I proposal that we augment ghc-6.12.1's support for Unicode Handles by adding the following functions to System.IO: hSetOnEncodingError :: Handle -> OnEncodingError -> IO () hGetOnEncodingError :: Handle -> IO OnEncodingError as well as the enumeration `OnEncodingError` with three constructors: - `ThrowEncodingError`: Throw an exception at the first encoding or decoding error. - `SkipEncodingError`: Skip all invalid bytes or characters. - `TranslitEncodingError`: Replace undecodable bytes with u+FFFD, and unencodable characters with '?'. I have implemented this functionality in a patch attached to the ticket. Haddock docs are here: http://code.haskell.org/~judah/new-io-docs/System-IO.html#23 The choice of error handler is orthogonal to the choice of encoder. Additionally, the same setting is used for both read and write modes. For portability, the handlers are written in pure Haskell rather than using GNU iconv's //TRANSLIT feature. Note that the text package, for example, provides more sophisticated error-handling options. However, I think the above choices are useful enough without making the API too complicated. Discussion deadline: September 9 Ticket: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3455 Best, -Judah