On 11/09/2012 09:30, Christian Maeder wrote:
Am 11.09.2012 00:22, schrieb Ganesh Sittampalam:
Hi,
tl;dr: I'd like to remove the String instances from the HTTP package.
The HTTP library is overloaded on the type for request and response bodies; there are instances for String and both strict and lazy Bytestrings.
Unfortunately, the String instance is rather broken. A String ought to represent Unicode data, but the HTTP wire format is bytes, and HTTP makes no attempt to handle encoding.
if you remove the String instance I would need to encode my strings manually (and maybe worse than it is done now).
The obvious way to encode them is to use ByteString.Char8.pack which is exactly what HTTP does now. I can't really think of anything worse that someone might do by accident.
Which alternative (better maintained) packages could I use if I have to change my code anyway?
There's http-conduit, which also doesn't support String, but does support https and has a much cleaner interface. If conduit ever made it into the Platform then it would be an obvious choice to replace HTTP; but I still have some faith in lazy IO which is one of the reasons why I put effort into the HTTP package. Cheers, Ganesh