[Haskell-beginners] Runtime error while feeding a binary to stdin

[Manuel Vázquez Acosta]

Hi all,

I'm quite new to Haskell.  While following the "Real World Haskell" and
doing some experimentation I came up with a anoying situation:

Trying to read data from stdin it seems that binary data is not
allowed.  A simple "copy" program:


   -- file: copy.hs
   import System.IO

   main = do
      input <- hGetContents stdin
      hPutStr input

Fails when I run it like:

   $ ghc copy.hs
   $ ./copy < input > output
   copy: <stdin>: hGetContents: invalid argument (invalid byte sequence)

input contains binary data.  In fact of all the following programs only
the first works with binary data:

  copy:: IO ()
  copy = do
    bracket (openBinaryFile "input" ReadMode) hClose $ \hi -> do
      bracket (openBinaryFile "ouput" WriteMode) hClose $ \ho -> do
        input <- hGetContents hi
        hPutStr ho input


  copy2:: IO ()
  copy2 = do
    -- Doesn't work with binary files
    source <- readFile "input"
    writeFile "output" source


  copy3:: IO ()
  copy3 = do
    -- Doesn't work with binary files either
    interact (map $ \x -> x)


  copy4:: IO ()
  copy4 = do
    input <- hGetContents stdin
    hPutStr stdout input


But I lost any chance of piping and/or using '<', '>' in the shell.

Best regards,
Manuel.