[Haskell-cafe] Writing binary files?

[Sven Panne]

Glynn Clements wrote:
> [...]
> 	main :: IO ()
> 	main = do
> 		h <- openBinaryFile "out.dat" WriteMode
> 		hPutStr h $ map (octetToChar . bitsToOctet) bits
> 		hClose h

Hmmm, using string I/O when one really wants to do binary I/O gives me a bad
feeling. Haskell characters are defined to be Unicode characters, so the
above only works because current Haskell implementations usually get this wrong
(either no Unicode support at all and/or ignoring any encodings and doing I/O
only with the lower 8 bits of the characters)... hGetBuf/hPutBuf plus their
non-blocking variants are the only way to *really* do binary I/O currently.

Cheers,
    S.