Proposal: platform should provide utf8 IO support

[dons]

Support for utf8 has been requested. However, no specific package was proposed. Closing this in favour of specific package requests.

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Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 16:23:31 -0700
From: Simon Michael
Subject: add utf8-string in haskell platform

I'd like to request that utf8-string be added to the haskell platform, so that HP users can work with non-ascii text

Discussion

• A discussion took place: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2009-May/thread.html#11704

[dons]

Bryan O'Sullivan:

I'd rather this wasn't added. It's an acceptable crutch for the short term, but we shouldn't be using String for text manipulation, and bundling utf8-string implicitly blesses that approach. The text library needs a few weeks of polish and some more testing work for QA, but it'll be the right answer well before the end of this year.

[tibbe]

I agree with Bryan. text seems like a better option. If text is still lacking in some areas maybe we could list the deficiencies and have them fixed.

[bos]

The text package does indeed need some work, and I'll write up what I think is needed some time in the next few days, time permitting.

However, text doesn't have a dependency on ICU; that's confined to the text-icu package. We might want to have pure Haskell equivalents of the functionality that text-icu provides, but that's a huge amount of thankless work.

[refold]

Milestone 2009.4.0 deleted