[Haskell-cafe] invalid character encoding

[John Goerzen]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 10:44:28AM +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 07:38:09PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> > I've got some gzip (and Ian Lynagh's Inflate) code that breaks under
> > the new hugs with:
> > 
> >  <handle>: IO.getContents: protocol error (invalid character encoding)
> > 
> > What is going on, and how can I fix it?
> 
> A Haskell 98 Handle is a character stream, and doesn't support binary
> I/O.  This would have bitten you sooner or later on systems that do CRLF

Yes, probably so..

> conversion, but Hugs is now much stricter, because character streams now
> use the encoding determined by the current locale (for the C locale, that
> means ASCII only).

Hmm, this seems to be completely undocumented.  So yes, I'll try using
openBinaryFile, but the docs I have seen still talk only about CRLF and
^Z.

Anyway, I'm intrested in this new feature (I assume GHC 6.4 has it as
well?)  Would it, for instance, automatically convert from Latin-1 to
UTF-16 on read, and the inverse on write?  Or to/from UTF-8?

Thanks,

-- John