[Haskell-cafe] writeFile: commitBuffer: invalid argument (Illegal byte sequence)

[Albert Y. C. Lai]

On 11-12-04 07:08 AM, dokondr wrote:
> In  GHC 7.0.3 / Mac OS X when trying to:
>
> writeFile "someFile" "(Hoping You Have A iPhone When I Do This) Lol
> Sleep Is When You Close These ---> \55357\56384"
>
> I get:
> commitBuffer: invalid argument (Illegal byte sequence)
>
> The string I am trying to write can also be seen here:
> http://twitter.com/#!/search/Hoping%20You%20Have%20A%20iPhone%20When%20I%20Do%20This%20lang%3Aen
> <http://twitter.com/#%21/search/Hoping%20You%20Have%20A%20iPhone%20When%20I%20Do%20This%20lang%3Aen>

\55357 and \56384 would be surrogates D83D and DC40 for use in UTF-16 
only. Haskell's Char is not a UTF-16 code unit (unlike early versions of 
Java and probably current ones). GHC is correct in rejecting them.

Haskell's Char is a Unicode character directly. If you want the 
character U+1F440 "EYES", write \128064 directly (or \x1f440, or \x1F440).

Use http://www.unicode.org/charts/ to find out what you are getting 
into. You can enter a hexadecimal number or choose a category.