Re: add utf8-string in haskell platform

On 15/05/2009 03:07, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Simon Michael mailto:simon@joyful.com> wrote:

I'd like to request that utf8-string be added to the haskell platform, so that HP users can work with non-ascii text.

I'd rather this wasn't added. It's an acceptable crutch for the short term, but we shouldn't be using String for text manipulation, and bundling utf8-string implicitly blesses that approach. The text library needs a few weeks of polish and some more testing work for QA, but it'll be the right answer well before the end of this year.

We ought to think about the interaction between text (and bytestring) and the new Unicode IO library. What does text have in the way of IO operations? I've been wondering about what bytestring's hGetLine should do. Right now I have it doing decoding and then taking the low 8 bits, but that's not right. OTOH, looking for '\n' in a stream of bytes doesn't seem right. Maybe it should just be deprecated. Cheers, Simon