Follow up question

I am a bit confused by your response Mieszko. What I am looking to do is have a function say called ConvertString :: IO String -> String or something like that. Not sure if your examples achieve this. I want to take the IO String and be able to use it as a String somehow. My problem is I have a function for instance getWord :: String -> String getWord [] = [] getWord (x:xs) | elem x whitespace = [] | otherwise = x : getWord xs If I change the header to getWord :: IO String -> IO String I get errors of types not matching. Sorry if these are stupid questions but I am very confused by the difference of IO String and String, and want to know how you can use the IO String like a String. Thank you. Rob