DBCS encoding support on Windows

[Max Bolingbroke]

This is now in HEAD.

Enjoy!
Max


On 23 April 2013 21:29, Max Bolingbroke <batterseapower at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Hi GHCers,
>
> I've implemented support in GHC for extra Windows code pages on the branch
> "dbcs" of the base library.
>
> The problem this solves is that currently users of Haskell on a Windows
> machine running in a locale which uses a double-byte code page such as
> CP936 (GBK) or CP950 (Big5) cannot properly interact with the Windows
> console in their native language. Unfortunately code page support is a
> prerequisite for getting this to work correctly because for all Microsoft's
> fine talk about Unicode being the future, the Windows console does not seem
> to support it properly - code pages are the only way to go for console
> input and output.
>
> As the standard Windows locale encodings in many regions, these code pages
> are also the predominant method of encoding text files in many countries,
> so they are useful outside the console.
>
> The solution is along the lines suggested in
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3977, i.e. we create an
> iconv-like interface to Window's MultiByteToWideChar and
> WideCharToMultiByte APIs by the judicious use of binary search. In my
> branch, these APIs will be used whenever we don't have a built-in native
> Haskell TextEncoding for the code page (we used to fall back on using
> latin1 for such code pages).
>
> Unless there are any objections I'll merge this into the base library main
> branch next week.
>
> Cheers,
> Max
>
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