Hi Paolino. What's happening is reading [Char] uses the Storable instance for Char which is 32-bit. Thus, you get gibberish. The below does what you want, by reading Word8s and converting them. import Control.Exception import Data.Char import Data.Iteratee.IO import Data.Iteratee.Base import Data.Word import System.IO main :: IO () main = do h <- openFile "mamma23" ReadWriteMode hPutStr h "ciao" hSeek h AbsoluteSeek 0 l <- enumHandle h readString >>= run print $ assert (l == "ciao") () -- This is declared on its own so I can give a type signature without making -- any of the above lines unmanageably long. readString :: IterateeG [] Word8 IO String readString = joinI $ mapStream (chr . fromIntegral) stream2list This only works for ASCII, of course. Someone should write some enumerators for the other encodings. Regards, Echo Nolan