[Haskell-cafe] accents

[Daniel Fischer]

On Friday 07 May 2010 17:05:08, Dupont Corentin wrote:
> Hello,
> i'm still struggling with ghci and accents.
>
> Prelude> "é"
> "\233"

That uses the Show instance of Char, which escapes all characters greater 
than '\127' ('\DEL'), so that's no problem, jut inconvenient.

>
> I've installed GHC 6.12.1, which gave me a better result:
>
> Prelude> putStrLn "é"
> é

putStrLn doesn't escape printable characters.

>
> but still:
>
> Prelude> "é"
> "\233"

That's interpreted as 

print "é"

which is

putStrLn (show "é")

, hence escaped.

>
> I'm trying to search a file with french words with Regex, but i
> stumble on accents:
>
> *Main> findRegexFile "abnégation"
> []
> *Main> findRegexFile "abn.gation"
> ["abn\218gation","abn\218gations"]
>

Okay, your file seems to have a weird encoding.

Prelude> putStrLn [toEnum 218]
Ú

>
> I don't know the encoding of my file, how to deduce it?
> What is the encoding used by ghci? Unicode?

I think it uses the system locale and defaults to utf-8 if it can't 
determine the locale.

> Its seems not be the same since the représentation for "é" is not the
> same (\233 and \218).
> How to have accented characters in ghci? Can't find any ressources on
> the net.
>
> Cheers,
> Corentin
>
> PS: please let me know is you can't see the accented characters in
> this email, i'll send you another version with pictures.
>
> On 3/24/10, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Dupont Corentin <corentin.dupont at gmail.com> writes:
> >>> a <- readFile "list.txt"
> >>> head $ lines a
> >>
> >> "abn\233gation"
> >>
> >> putStrLn displays a strange character for the "é".
> >
> > That is the escaped form of é.  You have several options:
> >
> > 1) Use the utf8-string package for I/O
> > 2) Use the text package for I/O (and set an encoding)
> > 3) GHC 6.12.1 uses the system's locale for encoding; as such if your
> > system normally lets you see accented characters then putStrLn,
> > etc. will print them out.