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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T04:40:59+00:00

I’m writing a Haskell program which generates an XML file. Apparently it is considered

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I’m writing a Haskell program which generates an XML file. Apparently it is considered traditional to specify the character encoding in the <?xml?> tag. My question is, what’s the best thing to do?

  1. Use hGetEncoding to look up the file’s encoding, and record that in the XML file header.

  2. Use hSetEncoding to specify which encoding I want, and then hard-code that into the XML file header.

The first option appears to have the problem that I’d need a way to translate what Haskell calls the encoding into what XML calls it. The second has the problem that unless I can figure out what encoding all the other applications on my PC use, the file will be unreadable (except to web browsers).

All of which is slightly baffling, because I almost certainly don’t even need Unicode anyway. I’m just writing plain ordinary English text with no special characters… (Ah, but the £ sign varies by encoding, doesn’t it? sigh)

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  1. Editorial Team

    I would recommend you use one of the already existing XML libraries on Hackage, such as xml-conduit, which will automatically handle encoding issues for you. In general, I strongly recommend outputting UTF-8 data.

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