Hello, I'd like to announce that I have posted a UTF-8 encoding/decoding library to hackage. This library also includes replacements for most of the System.IO namespace under System.IO.UTF8. This library detects overlong sequences, and replaces invalid code-points and invalid encodings with the replacement character '\xfffd'. The following file was used to ensure that the decoder was considered "safe": http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-test.txt utf8-string can be found on hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/utf8-string-0.1 source code is available via: darcs get http://code.haskell.org/utf8-string/ -- Eric Mertens