Encoding issues

Introduction

Character encoding is a tricky issue. Different systems have different conventions, and they may not be correct for a particular use. There is a distinction between characters (Char) and bytes (Word8). Conversion between the two can be done in many ways. This page gives an overview of how these issues should be handled.

It is important to note that the issue of encoding is completely orthogonal to the use of ByteString/PackageString/WhateverString. Such a type is either a list of bytes, equivalent to [Word8] or it is a string, a list of character, [Char].

Encoding/Decoding/Conversion

There are three kinds of operations...