alexey.skladnoy:
This upsets me. We need to get on with doing this properly. The System.IO.UTF8 module is a useful interim workaround but we're not using it properly most of the time.
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The right thing to do is to make Prelude.putStrLn do the right thing. We had a long discussion on how to fix the H98 IO functions to do this better. We just need to get on with it, or we'll end up with too many cases of people using System.IO.UTF8 inappropriately.
But this bring question what "the right thing" is? If locale is UTF8 or system support unicode some other way - no problem, just encode string properly. Problem is how to deal with untanslatable characters. Skip? Replace with question marks? Anything other? Probably we need to look how this is solved in other languages. (Or not solved)
And this problem related not only to IO. It raises whenever strings cross border between haskell world and outside world. Opening files with unicode names, execing, etc.
For example: Prelude> readFile "файл" *** Exception: D09;: openFile: does not exist (No such file or directory) Prelude> executeFile "echo" True ["Сейчас сломается"] Nothing !59G0A A;><05BAO
Althrough it's possible to work around using encodeString/decodeString from Codec.Binary.UTF8.String it won't work on non-UTF8 systems. It's not only neandertalian systems with one-byte locales, windows AFAIK uses other unicode encoding.
For just decoding / encoding in other locales, there are codec libraries. Hunt around on hackage. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/encoding http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/Encode -- Don