Get Programming with Haskell

Lesson 23. Working with text and Unicode

After reading lesson 23, you’ll be able to

• Use the Text type for more-efficient text processing
• Change Haskell’s behavior with language extensions
• Program by using common text functions
• Use Text to properly handle Unicode text

So far in this book, you’ve made heavy use of the String type. In the preceding lesson, you saw that you can even view an I/O stream as a lazy list of type Char, or a String. String has been useful in helping you explore many topics in this book. Unfortunately, String has a huge problem: it can be woefully inefficient.

From a philosophical standpoint, nothing could be more perfect than representing one of the more important types in programing as one of the most foundational ...