[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Evan Laforge]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
<allbery at ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
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> On 8/13/10 16:37 , Kevin Jardine wrote:
>> Surely efficient Unicode text should always be the default? And if the
>
> Efficient for what?  The most efficient Unicode representation for
> Latin-derived strings is UTF-8, but the most efficient for CJK is UTF-16.

I have an app that is using Data.Text, however I'm thinking of
switching to UTF8 bytestrings.  The reasons are that there are two
main things I do with text: pass it to a C API to display, and parse
it.  The C API expects UTF8, and the parser libraries with a
reputation for being fast all seem to have bytestring inputs, but not
Data.Text (I'm using unpack -> parsec, which is not optimal).