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haskellghcbytestring

Converting literal Chars to Word8

The documentation for ByteString gives the following code example:

breakByte :: Word8 -> ByteString -> (ByteString, ByteString)
breakByte 'c' "abcd"

However when I write the same I get the following error (ideone):

Couldn't match expected type `GHC.Word.Word8'
            with actual type `Char'

Of course 'c' is a Char, not Word8. Presumably they're using some extension which allows a fromInteger style function to work automatically on Char literals, but I'm not sure what. {-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-} doesn't seem to make any difference.

Solution

  • Just import the Char8 versions of the modules. These do the byte conversions. Note that this is for 8 bit characters. So don't try putting unicode data into it.