text-1.2.4.1: An efficient packed Unicode text type.

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.

import qualified Data.Text as T

ICU Support

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.

Internal Representation: UTF-16 vs. UTF-8

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.