In a private email to Ketil Malde, I said that Ocaml programmers use the preprocessor to solve the problem of character encoding:
ocamlopt -pp myfilter.exe myprogram.ml -o myoutput.exe
I wonder whether a similar solution could be used with Haskell. I am new to Haskell, but I suppose that Haskell may accept something like
ghc -pgmF myfilter.exe myprogram.hs --make
If the answer is yes, what should I substitute for myfilter.exe?
--- On Tue, 10/27/09, Ketil Malde
Brandon> So yes, it's reasonable to "blame" the language (spec).
On the other hand, the sooner users can get moving to utf-8, the sooner we can get eliminate these kinds of problems.
Note also that it mentions the Unicode character set, not a particular Unicode encoding scheme.
To me that implies that an implementation must support all 7 encoding schemes, not just UTF-8.
...but not latin1, which appeared to be the problem here.
At which point you probably want to make use of iconv, so you might as well support all iconv-supported encodings.
Interestingly, Wikipedia [0] says that "Unicode-aware programs are required to display, print and manipulate [UTF-32 and -16]", although no source is provided for this requirement. But until somebody actually has Haskell sources in a Unicode-encoding different from utf-8, I'd much prefer developers to spend their time on something more useful. (And the workaround is just one line in a Makefile, isn't it?) -k [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Unicode_encodings -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe __________________________________________________________________ Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr! http://www.flickr.com/gift/