[Haskell-cafe] The Nature of Char and String

[Glynn Clements]

John Goerzen wrote:

> > > * If I use hPutStr on a string, is it guaranteed that the number of
> > >   8-bit bytes written equals (length stringWritten)?
> > 
> > Yes, if the handle is opened in binary mode. No if not.
> 
> Thank you for the informative response.
> 
> If a file is opened in text mode, what encoding does Haskell grok on
> input?  And what encoding does it generate on output?  I'm assuming
> it's UTF-8 on output, but I don't know for sure.

Haskell doesn't specify an encoding. GHC and Hugs both assume
ISO-8859-1.

The only difference between binary and text modes is that text mode
converts between the platform's EOL conventions (i.e. LF on Unix, CRLF
on Windows) and LF.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>