At 2002-08-07 17:37, Sven Moritz Hallberg wrote:

Hm, what about encodeCharUTF16? Would that return Word16s?

UTF-16 may represent a single Char as one or two Word16s. encodeCharUTF16 :: Char -> [Word16]; or encodeCharUTF16 :: Char -> (Word16,Maybe Word16); or encodeCharUTF16 :: Char -> Either Word16 (Word16,Word16);

Hrm. But then, how to write that to a file?

Depends on what order you want the halves of each Word16. Unicode 3.0 defines four character encoding forms/schemes: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16LE, and UTF-16BE. UTF-16 encodes as 16-bit units, the other three encode as 8-bit units. So you might have something like this: encodeUTF8 :: String -> [Word8]; encodeUTF16 :: String -> [Word16]; encodeUTF16LE :: String -> [Word8]; encodeUTF16BE :: String -> [Word8]; The authority here is Unicode Technical Report 17, which is part of the Unicode Standard. <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr17/> But watch out... I've noticed a certain amount of incoherence in the Unicode standards, for instance Unicode 3.0 sec. 2.3 refers to UTF-16 one of four "Character Encoding Schemes" which is "an encoding form plus byte serialization" even though UTF-16 by itself doesn't include byte serialization. -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA