[Haskell] System.FilePath survey

[John Meacham]

On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 04:25:35PM +0000, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
> The point is that different things are natively handled in different 
> formats under different OSes, e.g.
> 
>                  Posix       NT             Win9x
> 
> pathnames        bytes       UTF-16         locale
> command line     bytes       UTF-16         locale
> file contents    bytes       bytes          bytes
> pipes/sockets    bytes       bytes          bytes

actually, Posix systems should be the following

> pathnames        locale       UTF-16         locale
> command line     locale       UTF-16         locale
> file contents    *            bytes          bytes
> pipes/sockets    *            bytes          bytes

Although the Posix interface is in terms of bytes, the strings should
always be interpreted via the locale specified in $LANG or $LC_CTYPE
also, for file contents and pipes/sockets, if you are passing text, and
in the absence of some overriding standard or protocol, you should be
using the encoding specified in the locale too.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈