Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Johan Tibell wrote:

Here's a rule of thumb: If you have binary data, use Data.ByteString. If you have text, use Data.Text. Those libraries have benchmarks and have been well tuned by experienced Haskelleres and should be the fastest and most memory compact in most cases. There are still a few cases where String beats Text but they are being worked on as we speak.

It's a good rule, but I don't know how helpful it is to someone doing XML processing. From what I can tell, the only XML library that uses Data.Text is libxml-sax, although tagsoup can probably be easily extended to use it. HXT, HaXml, and xml all use [Char] internally. -- Dave Menendez http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/