[Haskell-beginners] Simple UTF-8 output

[Elvio Toccalino]

In case your ini file is not the problem, check the output of your
conversion piped (mentioned in the other mail: Data.Text.IO.putStrLn $
Data.Text.Encodings.decodeUtf8 $ bytestringResult) using decodeASCII,
just to see what comes out.

BTW, the \xe6 is the UTF8 code for the small letter AE, which I'm
guessing is not something you'd use in a query string :P 
Unless you're storing some very cosmopolitan data in your database, I¿d
say someone is messing your codes. So far, this hasn't happened to me
using the Haskell libraries recommended here.

On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 20:35 -0800, Christopher Howard wrote:
> On 05/27/2011 08:01 PM, Christopher Howard wrote:
> > On 05/26/2011 11:38 PM, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> >> Elvio Toccalino wrote:
> >>
> >>> I usually pull such values as ByteStrings. The utf8-strings package
> >>> provides printing functions for such data.
> >>> Also, if you'd like to work on it as Text, there's the
> >>> Data.Text.Encodings module, to decodeUTF8 or decodeASCII ByteString's
> >>> into Text.
> >>
> >> I would recommend Data.Text because that is designed for Text
> >> encodings while ByteString is designed for handling arrays
> >> of bytes (eg things like data read from an network socket).
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> Erik
> > 
> > Thank you everyone for your responses, but I'm still having trouble with
> > this issue. This is what I've learned so far:
> > 
> > - The problem is not my terminal: commands like putStrLn "\228" produce
> > the correct character.
> > - The problem doesn't seem to be my MySQL database. The character
> > encoding on the database and on the table are set to UTF-8. I can view
> > the characters just fine when in the MySQL client.
> > - I looked again at the character numbers on the special characters
> > being outputted by my program: They are not the correct Unicode numbers.
> > Apparently the special characters are somehow getting mangled when I
> > pull them from the database.
> > - The choice to put the query results into ByteStrings was not mine,
> > that is just what is in the results list that quickQuery gives me. I
> > tried converting to Text and then to String by using "unpack (decodeUtf8
> > byte_str)"; however, when the program goes to print its first line with
> > an extended character, it just throws the exception: "*** Exception:
> > Cannot decode byte '\xe6': Data.Text.Encoding.decodeUtf8: Invalid UTF-8
> > stream".
> > 
> 
> Update: I think this may be a problem with the myodbc5 driver. If I
> connect with isql and then select the data, the results with extended
> characters have the text either mangled or replaced with "***ERROR***".
> So I am thinking either this MySQL driver for unixODBC either is not
> able to handle the UTF-8, or (more likely) I don't have the correct
> options in my .odbc.ini config file.
>