Hi all, I know this sounds daft but I do have good reason to ask. Is it possible that GHC's core itself has a problem with a particular Umlaut only? HDBC-ODBC won't read in data from an SQLite database as soon as it comes accross a *lowercase* U-Umlaut ("ü") ghci crashes. Other Umlauts ("ä", "ö" and "ß") pass however. This is the error message: readUTF8Char: illegal UTF-8 character 252 As I said, other Umlauts do pass. I got this very message quite often, usually when working with databases and not always using HDBC but also Takusen. I kept blaming it on HDBC-ODBC or the input data but I might have been wrong there. Günther