[Haskell-cafe] Non-ASCII characters in .cabal files break Haddock?

Bayley, Alistair Alistair.Bayley at invesco.com
Wed Jan 20 06:20:43 EST 2010


> I recently uploaded a package to Hackage[1], which contains a
> non-ASCII character in the .cabal file. That file is encoded with
> UTF-8, and it displays fine in Vim, Firefox, and even the Hackage
> package landing page. However, Haddock is failing to build it[2] --
> apparently it can't handle UTF-8 encoded text properly.
> 
> In documentation sections, Haddock supports special syntax for
> escaping non-ASCII. Is there any equivalent syntax for Cabal files?

What happens if you use the Haddock syntax in the cabal file
(description field)?

It's not even certain that Haddock is choking on UTF8 - it might be some
other encoding. The description from the cabal file is written to a temp
file, and this is passed to haddock with the --prologue option. In your
log output we can see:

/usr/local/bin/haddock --use-contents=/package/natural-sort-0.1
--prologue=dist/doc/html/natural-sort/haddock-prolog17177.txt ...
haddock: internal Haddock or GHC error:
dist/doc/html/natural-sort/haddock-prolog17177.txt: hGetContents:
invalid argument (Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character)

So it is actually hGetContents that is choking on the
haddock-prolog17177.txt file. That might well depend on the default
encoding for the shell that runs the build. What happens on your own
machine?

Alistair
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