[Haskell-cafe] Unicode normalization

[wren ng thornton]

Hello all,

I'm in need of a Unicode normalization function, Utf8 NFC for ByteString 
in particular. From some quick Googling around it looks like the only 
available option is to use ICU in some form. The text-icu package has a 
nice binding to it, but unfortunately that means a lot of redundant 
conversions (Utf8 ByteString -> Text; Text -> Utf8 ByteString) and an 
additional rather large non-Haskell dependency[1].

Is ICU really the only available implementation of normalization? The 
TR15 doesn't really give a complete algorithm and only hints at the 
"numerous opportunities for optimization" implicit in the complexity of 
the spec.


[1] Which is especially annoying on OSX since OSX does ship with libicu 
in a public location, but it doesn't provide header files and apparently 
it's incomplete somehow, meaning you'd have to reinstall it for text-icu 
to use (and hilarity ensues when your copy gets out of sync with the OS's).

-- 
Live well,
~wren