Am 11.09.2012 19:38, schrieb Ganesh Sittampalam:
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.
My main use-case is simpleHTTP that is bound to the String instance, currently. There are no such short-cuts for byte-strings, are there? I'ld suggest to make a proper byte-string interface first and then deprecate the String stuff. (before calling Char8.pack, strings could be checked or filtered for "isAscii") Cheers Christian