Binary IO

Hello, I've been playing around with decoding binary files, and I couldn't find a function in the libraries to read a byte from a file. Does anyone know if there is such a function? If not, I think we should add one. Currently I am using hGetChar for this purpose but it seems that we should have: hGetByte :: Handle -> IO Word8 I don't think that hGetChar is good enough because characters are not bytes. In particular it seems that an implementation could consult the system's locale settings and use a variable character encoding such as UTF8. Also on a related note, is there a way to work with memory mapped files in Haskell/GHC? -Iavor