I've been working on adding proper Unicode support to Handle I/O in GHC, and I finally have something that's ready for testing. I've put a patchset here: http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/base-unicode.tar.gz That is a set of patches against a GHC repo tree: unpack the tarball, and say 'sh apply /path/to/ghc/repo' to apply all the patches. Then clean your tree and build it from scratch (or if you're using the new GHC build system, just say 'make' ;-). It should validate, bar one or two minor failures. Oh, it doesn't work on Windows yet. That's the major thing left to do. If anyone else felt like tackling this I'd be delighted: all you have to do is implement a Win32 equivalent of the module GHC.IO.Encoding.Iconv (see below), everything else should work unchanged. Depending on whether any further changes are required, I may amend-record some of these patches, so treat them as temporary patches for testing only. Below is what will be the patch description in the patch for libraries/base. Comments/discussion please! Cheers, Simon Unicode-aware Handles ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This is a significant restructuring of the Handle implementation with the primary goal of supporting Unicode character encodings. The only change to the existing behaviour is that by default, text IO is done in the prevailing encoding of the system. Handles created by openBinaryFile use the Latin-1 encoding, as do Handles placed in binary mode using hSetBinaryMode. We provide a way to change the encoding for an existing Handle: hSetEncoding :: Handle -> TextEncoding -> IO () and various encodings: latin1, utf8, utf16, utf16le, utf16be, utf32, utf32le, utf32be, localeEncoding, and a way to lookup other encodings: mkTextEncoding :: String -> IO TextEncoding (it's system-dependent whether the requested encoding will be available). Currently hSetEncoding is availble from GHC.IO.Handle, and the encodings are available from GHC.IO.Encoding. We may want to export these from somewhere more permanent; that's something for a library proposal. Thanks to suggestions from Duncan Coutts, it's possible to call hSetEncoding even on buffered read Handles, and the right thing happens. So we can read from text streams that include multiple encodings, such as an HTTP response or email message, without having to turn buffering off (though there is a penalty for switching encodings on a buffered Handle, as the IO system has to do some re-decoding to figure out where it should start reading from again). If there is a decoding error, it is reported when an attempt is made to read the offending character from the Handle, as you would expect. Performance is about 30% slower on "hGetContents >>= putStr" than before. I've profiled it, and about 25% of this is in doing the actual encoding/decoding, the rest is accounted for by the fact that we're shuffling around 32-bit chars rather than bytes in the Handle buffer, so there's not much we can do to improve this. IO library restructuring ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The major change here is that the implementation of the Handle operations is separated from the underlying IO device, using type classes. File descriptors are just one IO provider; I have also implemented memory-mapped files (good for random-access read/write) and a Handle that pipes output to a Chan (useful for testing code that writes to a Handle). New kinds of Handle can be implemented outside the base package, for instance someone could write bytestringToHandle. A Handle is made using mkFileHandle: -- | makes a new 'Handle' mkFileHandle :: (IODevice dev, BufferedIO dev, Typeable dev) => dev -- ^ the underlying IO device, which must support -- 'IODevice', 'BufferedIO' and 'Typeable' -> FilePath -- ^ a string describing the 'Handle', e.g. the file -- path for a file. Used in error messages. -> IOMode -- ^ The mode in which the 'Handle' is to be used -> Maybe TextEncoding -- ^ text encoding to use, if any -> IO Handle This also means that someone can write a completely new IO implementation on Windows based on native Win32 HANDLEs, and distribute it as a separate package (I really hope somebody does this!). This restructuring isn't as radical as previous designs. I haven't made any attempt to make a separate binary I/O layer, for example (although hGetBuf/hPutBuf do bypass the text encoding). The main goal here was to get Unicode support in, and to allow others to experiment with making new kinds of Handle. We could split up the layers further later. API changes and Module structure ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NB. GHC.IOBase and GHC.Handle are now DEPRECATED (they are still present, but are just re-exporting things from other modules now). For 6.12 we'll want to bump base to version 5 and add a base4-compat. For now I'm using #if __GLASGOW_HASKEL__ >= 611 to avoid deprecated warnings. I split modules into smaller parts in many places. For example, we now have GHC.IORef, GHC.MVar and GHC.IOArray containing the implementations of IORef, MVar and IOArray respectively. This was necessary for untangling dependencies, but it also makes things easier to follow. The new module structurue for the IO-relatied parts of the base package is: GHC.IO Implementation of the IO monad; unsafe*; throw/catch GHC.IO.IOMode The IOMode type GHC.IO.Buffer Buffers and operations on them GHC.IO.Device The IODevice and RawIO classes. GHC.IO.BufferedIO The BufferedIO class. GHC.IO.FD The FD type, with instances of IODevice, RawIO and BufferedIO. GHC.IO.Exception IO-related Exceptions GHC.IO.Encoding The TextEncoding type; built-in TextEncodings; mkTextEncoding GHC.IO.Encoding.Types GHC.IO.Encoding.Iconv Implementation internals for GHC.IO.Encoding GHC.IO.Handle The main API for GHC's Handle implementation, provides all the Handle operations + mkFileHandle + hSetEncoding. GHC.IO.Handle.Types GHC.IO.Handle.Internals GHC.IO.Handle.Text Implementation of Handles and operations. GHC.IO.Handle.FD Parts of the Handle API implemented by file-descriptors: openFile, stdin, stdout, stderr, fdToHandle etc.