Export a function to convert from `String` to `Text` about basic-prelude HOT 11 CLOSED

Re-exporting fromString sounds like a great idea to me.

from basic-prelude.

fromString sounds like the right solution, though it always scares me because of broken instances like the Bytestring.Char8 one.

from basic-prelude.

Alternatively I thought it could be nice to have a custom ToText typeclass with a toText function and instances for all the exported types for which it makes sense. This way besides solving the current issue it would make it easy to convert to text from all kinds of ByteString and etc., which in my experience is a very common problem.

from basic-prelude.

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/text-format/0.3.0.8/doc/html/Data-Text-Buildable.html

from basic-prelude.

@nikita-volkov BTW, you cannot safely convert from ByteString to Text in the same way you can convert other types to Text, because to convert ByteString you must specify an encoding.

from basic-prelude.

+1 for including fromString, and possibly IsString as well. But I don't like the idea of adding any custom typeclasses to basic-prelude: I think the goal of basic-prelude should be, as much as possible, to reuse existing typeclass infrastructure, not create new, incompatible typeclasses.

from basic-prelude.

@singpolyma Yes, but I think decodeUtf8 would have covered most cases, since UTF8 is already a de facto standard. In other situations people are always free to make specific imports.

@snoyberg Yes, it's good that you have some groundrules behind the design of the package. What could be done is creating a third version of Prelude on top of BasicPrelude, which won't have these restrictions. Of course it wouldn't make much sense to do such thing just for a single class right now, so I just want you to consider it as a possiblity for future, when some similar requirements arise for other features.

from basic-prelude.

I'd say that classy-prelude is the place for that kind of stuff for me. But for people looking for a non-classy approach, there should certainly be another package available. And that's one of the main goals of basic-prelude: making it easy to create new preludes.

For the record, I really dislike the partial nature of decodeUtf8. I consider it to be a major bug in text actually. (Though it's the only misfeature I know of there.)

from basic-prelude.

Okay.

Partial nature - what's that?

from basic-prelude.

The following program:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
import Data.Text ()
import Data.Text.Encoding
import Data.ByteString.Char8 ()

main = print $ decodeUtf8 "\192"

produces:

Cannot decode byte '\xc0': Data.Text.Encoding.decodeUtf8: Invalid UTF-8 stream

from basic-prelude.

Oh.. Okay. Thank you

from basic-prelude.