Bulat Ziganshin
the right way to deal with [text encoding] "modifiers" is to attach them to the Handle itself like this:
f <- openFile "name" >>= withLocking >>= withEncoding utf8
This is nice! I think the Haskell Way of interpreting bytes as Latin-1 - while unfortunate in today's multi-everything environment - is something we just have to live with. Too much code expects this behavior, and too many tasks require just reading ASCII to be burdened with complications of locales and character sets. Attaching modifiers to handles appears to solve the problem of retaining 100% backwards compatibility, while opening for dealing with modern character sets. Somebody raised the question of reading a Content-type field, etc: would it be possible to "rewind" a handle after setting encoding? For Content-type fields, I suspect the header is usually limited to ASCII anyway, so adding decoding for subsequent text is probably sufficient. But how about a 'withDefaultEncoding' modifier that inspects the first two (or four?) bytes for a Unicode BOM, and either sets decoding accordingly and continues, or sets encoding according to locale *and* lets the user read the first bytes when reading from the handle. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants