[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

Kevin Jardine kevinjardine at gmail.com
Fri Aug 13 16:37:14 EDT 2010


I find it disturbing that a modern programming language like Haskell
still apparently forces you to choose between a representation for
"mostly ASCII text" and Unicode.

Surely efficient Unicode text should always be the default? And if the
Unicode format used by the Text library is not efficient enough then
can't that be fixed?

Cheers,
Kevin

On Aug 13, 10:28 pm, Ketil Malde <ke... at malde.org> wrote:
> Johan Tibell <johan.tib... at gmail.com> writes:
> > Here's a rule of thumb: If you have binary data, use Data.ByteString. If you
> > have text, use Data.Text.
>
> If you have a large amount of mostly ASCII text, use ByteString, since
> Data.Text uses twice the storage.  Also, ByteString might make more
> sense if the data is in a byte-oriented encoding, and the cost of
> encoding and decoding utf-16 would be significant.
>
> -k
> --
> If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
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