Some of my poor misguided students are still using Windows, and when they run my (predecessor's) Haskell program which uses Unicode box drawing characters in its output, they get *** Exception <stdout>: hPutChar: invalid argument (invalid character) Another student told them to change the console encoding via magic: chcp.com 65001 but a bit of googling suggests that a "modern Windows console program" should be using the widechar API to print Unicode and things should Just Work. Does Haskell have a principled view about character encodings? Or does it just say "I do byte strings, it's the user's problem"? Decades ago I was all in favour of charset-agnosticism, but these days I tend to think "go Unicode, and leave the legacy Latin-1 etc. data as the user's problem" :) Julian. -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.