Don Stewart
You can use either bytestrings, which will ignore any encoding,
Uh, I am hesitant to voice my protest here, but I think this bears some elaboration: Bytestrings are exactly that, strings of bytes. There are basically two interfaces, one (Data.ByteString[.Lazy]), which operates on raw bytes (and gives you Word8s), and another (Data.ByteString[.Lazy].Char8), which treats the contents as Chars. The latter will only deal with Unicode code points 0..255 (or ISO_8859-1) -- and truncate higher code point values to fit this range. Basically, bytestrings are the wrong tool for the job if you need more than 8 bits per character. I think the predecessors of bytestring (FPS?) had support for other fixed-size encodings, that is, two-byte and four-byte characters. Perhaps writing a Data.Word16String bytestrings-alike using UCS-2 would be an option? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants