[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Yitzchak Gale]

Sean Leather wrote:
> So then, what is the standard?
> ...I also noticeably don't see UTF-16.

Right there are a handful of language-specific 16-bit encodings
that are popular, from what I understand.

> So, if this is the case, then a similar question still arises for CJK text:
> What format/library to use for it (assuming one doesn't want a performance
> penalty for translating between Data.Text's internal format and the target
> format)? It appears that there are no ideal answers to such questions.

Right. If you know you'll be in a specific encoding - whether UTF-8,
Latin1, one of the CJK encodings, or whatever, it might sometimes
make sense to skip Data.Text and do the IO as raw bytes using
ByteString and then encode/decode manually only when needed.
Otherwise, Data.Text is probably the way to go.