text

An efficient packed, immutable Unicode text type (both strict and lazy), with a powerful loop fusion optimization framework. The Text type represents Unicode character strings, in a time and space-efficient manner. This package provides text processing capabilities that are optimized for performance critical use, both in terms of large data quantities and high speed. The Text type provides character-encoding, type-safe case conversion via whole-string case conversion functions (see Data.Text). It also provides a range of functions for converting Text values to and from ByteStrings, using several standard encodings (see Data.Text.Encoding). Efficient locale-sensitive support for text IO is also supported (see Data.Text.IO). These modules are intended to be imported qualified, to avoid name clashes with Prelude functions, e.g. To use an extended and very rich family of functions for working with Unicode text (including normalization, regular expressions, non-standard encodings, text breaking, and locales), see the text-icu package based on the well-respected and liberally licensed ICU library. Currently the text library uses UTF-16 as its internal representation which is neither a fixed-width nor always the most dense representation for Unicode text. We're currently investigating the feasibility of changing Text's internal representation to UTF-8 and if you need such a Text type right now you might be interested in using the spin-off packages text-utf8 and text-short.