1) reading UTF-8 coded text files into unicode-enabled Strings, lets call them UString
2) writing UStrings to UTF-8 coded text files 3) using unicode strings in-code, that is in my .hs files
In case of GHC:
String (Char actually) is unicode enabled. The current stable version cannot read UTF-8 encoded source files though (I've written a converter to workaround it - it escapes the national characters). The development version however is capable of reading UTF-8 encoded source files and does encode read strings using unicode.
However - the IO is not aware of Unicode. So in order to do 1) and 2) you have to - read/write stream of bytes encoding text in UTF-8 from/to a file - convert it to/from Unicode encoding.
The first one is just about reading/writing using normal IO operations. The second can be done with the following module: