[xmonad] UTF8 output from xmonad mangled

[Alexey Khudyakov]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Norbert Zeh <nzeh at cs.dal.ca> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm using xmobar as my status bar and have problems to get UTF8
> characters to display correctly.  I did the following tests:
>
> 1.  Start xmobar, reading input from stdin.  Type in some unicode
> characters.  Xmobar displays them fine.
>
> 2.  Add some unicode characters to my loghook in xmonad.  Things come
> out garbled.
>
> 3.  Instead of piping to xmobar, make xmonad write to a file.  The file
> contents are also garbled.  To be more precise, they are exactly what
> xmobar shows me in the second test.
>
> So this seems like the problem is on xmonad's end, not xmobar's.  I'm
> running the latest darcs version of xmonad.  Any ideas what could be
> causing this?
>
What version of GHC do you use? Starting from version 6.12 GHC properly
encodes strings. Earlier versions just truncated characters to 0-255 range.

If you use GHC 6.10 or earlier you should use encodeString from utf8-string
package to encode string in utf8 before writing to pipe.