[Xmonad] XSelection.hs - Unicode problems

[Andrea Rossato]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 05:43:53AM -0400, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> However, while it works fine for your basic bread and butter ASCII
> characters, I noticed that it does terrible things to more exotic
> phrases involving Unicode, such as "Henri Poincaré". I borrowed
> some code from utf-string, and that improved it a little bit -
> "Henri Poincar�" now becomes "Henri Poincarý" which is still
> better than "Henri Poincar\245" or whatever.
> 

Well, it is not better: Poincar\245 is right, the other is wrong,
since part of the character has been truncated.

> As far as I can tell, whenever a String involving UTF-8 stuff leaves
> the Haskell environment, it gets messed up. This is a little hard to
> test since things get messed up even when I test them in GHCi. :)
> But I'm sure it has to be something to do with Haskell, since I know
> I can copy and paste such strings with no problems using the mouse,
> and I know that my shell isn't the problem and nor are the Surfraw
> programs I use to pass them to Firefox (and Firefox obviously has no
> problems handling those characters).

The problem is not Haskell, it's me (and you..;-): actually , while I
have a clear undertsnding of Unicode and utf-8 in general, I don't
know how to handle multi-byte characters in any language that is not
Php...;-)

I hope Mats Jansborg is still reading the mailing list: hopefully he
could give us some direction.

> Any ideas on how to fix this?
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -- |
> -- Module      :  XMonadContrib.XSelection
> -- Copyright   :  (C) 2007 Andrea Rossato

thanks for the gift, but copyright should belong to you, since you wrote it...;-)

If I test hxsel with the first 3 Cyrillic characters of this page:
http://gorgias.mine.nu/unicode.php
I get:
\u041f\u0440\u0438
which is the correct answer. The problem is: how can I convert this
unicode characters into something that can be printed?

Andrea