Unicode support for text I/O

[igloo]

This means adding Unicode encoding/decoding for Text I/O handles.

Consensus was that Text I/O should always use the current locale encoding.

You can elect to have no encoding by opening in binary mode, but that's all.

Presumably this will need the ability to convert between arbitrary encodings internally, so it would make sense to also expose this functionality as a library.

[duncan]

Replying to igloo:

You can elect to have no encoding by opening in binary mode, but that's all.

With the existing H98 and System.IO api, yes.

Presumably this will need the ability to convert between arbitrary encodings internally, so it would make sense to also expose this functionality as a library.

Not arbitrary character sets or encodings thereof, just to and from Unicode.

Note that there is already a library that provides converting between pairs of character sets and encodings - the iconv package on hackage. We could probably make another lib that provides a portable lowest common denominator of that and the Win32 encodings API.

[simonmar]

Done.

Fri Jun 12 06:56:31 PDT 2009  Simon Marlow <marlowsd@gmail.com>
  * Rewrite of the IO library, including Unicode support