[Haskell-cafe] The question of ByteString

[Paul Johnson]

Andrew Coppin wrote:
> Duncan Coutts wrote:
>> Yes, the semantics are different. ByteString is stricter. In some
>> circumstances you could discover that some list is being used
>> sufficiently strictly (spine and element strict) that you could do a
>> representation change to use strict arrays. It is something I have
>> pondered occasionally and I think that is an interesting avenue for
>> research.
Also important is the fact that String = [Char], and a Char can hold any 
Unicode character, whereas a ByteString is a sequence of Word8 elements 
(i.e. integers from 0-255).  If you want to store a Char in a ByteString 
then you have to convert it to UTF-8 or something similar.

The Encoding package 
(http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/encoding-0.2) 
has the functions for this kind of thing.

Paul.