On 30 March 2011 07:52, Michael Snoyman
I could manually do something like (utf8Decode . S8.pack), but that presumes that the character encoding on the system in question is UTF8. So two questions:
Funnily enough I have been thinking about this quite hard recently, and the situation is kind of a mess and short of implementing PEP383 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0383/) in GHC I can't see how to make it easier on the programmer. As Jason points out the best you can really do is probably: 1. Treat Strings that represent filenames as raw byte sequences, even though they claim to be strings 2. When presenting such Strings to the user, re-decode them by using the current locale encoding (which will typically be UTF-8). You probably want to have some means of avoiding decoding errors here too -- ignoring or replacing undecodable bytes -- but presently this is not so straightforward. If you happen to be on a system with GNU Iconv you can use it's "C//TRANSLIT//IGNORE" encoding to achieve this, however. Cheers, Max