Char package:base-prelude

The character type Char is an enumeration whose values represent Unicode (or equivalently ISO/IEC 10646) code points (i.e. characters, see http://www.unicode.org/ for details). This set extends the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set (the first 256 characters), which is itself an extension of the ASCII character set (the first 128 characters). A character literal in Haskell has type Char. To convert a Char to or from the corresponding Int value defined by Unicode, use toEnum and fromEnum from the Enum class respectively (or equivalently ord and chr).

An encoding in which Unicode code points are translated to bytes by taking the code point modulo 256. When decoding, bytes are translated directly into the equivalent code point. This encoding never fails in either direction. However, encoding discards information, so encode followed by decode is not the identity.

Read a character from the standard input device (same as hGetChar stdin).

Computation hGetChar hdl reads a character from the file or channel managed by hdl, blocking until a character is available. This operation may fail with:

• isEOFError if the end of file has been reached.

Computation hPutChar hdl ch writes the character ch to the file or channel managed by hdl. Characters may be buffered if buffering is enabled for hdl. This operation may fail with:

• isFullError if the device is full; or
• isPermissionError if another system resource limit would be exceeded.

Read a string representation of a character, using Haskell source-language escape conventions. For example:

lexLitChar  "\\nHello"  =  [("\\n", "Hello")]

Makes a constructor for Char.

Constructs the Char type

Write a character to the standard output device (same as hPutChar stdout).

Read a string representation of a character, using Haskell source-language escape conventions, and convert it to the character that it encodes. For example:

readLitChar "\\nHello"  =  [('\n', "Hello")]

utility function converting a Char to a show function that simply prepends the character unchanged.

Convert a character to a string using only printable characters, using Haskell source-language escape conventions. For example:

showLitChar '\n' s  =  "\\n" ++ s