I've got another n00b question, thanks for all the help you have been giving me! I want to read a text file. As an example, let's use /usr/share/dict/words and try to print out the last line of the file. First of all I came up with this program: import System.IO main = readFile "/usr/share/dict/words" >>= putStrLn.last.lines This program gives the following error, presumably because there is an ISO-8859-1 character in the dictionary: "Program error: <handle>: IO.getContents: protocol error (invalid character encoding)" How can I tell the Haskell system that it is to read ISO-8859-1 text rather than UTF-8? I now used iconv to convert the file to UTF-8 and tried again. This time it worked, but it seems horribly inefficient -- Hugs took 2.8 seconds to read a 96,000 line file. By contrast the equivalent Python program: print open("words", "r").readlines()[-1] took 0.05 seconds. I assume I must be doing something wrong here, and somehow causing Haskell to use a particularly inefficient algorithm. Can anyone give me any clues what I should be doing instead? Thanks again, Pete