Haskell: Specify encoding and decoding

Encoding is a process of storing given sequence of characters into specialized format, for efficient transformation and storage. Decoding is the reverse process of encoding which converts this specialized format into sequence of characters. Haskell provides following functions to set and get encoding used in transformation.

Function	Signature	Description
hSetEncoding	hSetEncoding :: Handle -> TextEncoding -> IO ()	Sets the text encoding for the handle hdl to given encoding. localeEncoding is the default encoding for a handle at the time of creation. If you open a file in Binary mode, encoding don’t affects here, since binary mode uses no encoding at all.
hGetEncoding	hGetEncoding :: Handle -> IO (Maybe TextEncoding)	Return the current TextEncoding for the specified Handle, or Nothing if the Handle is in binary mode.

Following encoding schemes are supported by TextEncoding type.

Encoding	Description
latin1	Uses ISO8859-1 encoding. It uses first 256 Unicode code points, so when you try to write a character greater than '\255' to a Handle using the latin1 encoding will result in an error.
utf8	The UTF-8 Unicode encoding.
utf8_bom	The UTF-8 BOM is a sequence of bytes (EF BB BF) that allows the reader to identify a file as being encoded in UTF-8.
utf16	The UTF-16 Unicode encoding.
utf16le	The UTF-16 Unicode encoding (litte-endian)
utf16be	The UTF-16 Unicode encoding (big-endian)
utf32	The UTF-32 Unicode encoding.
utf32le	The UTF-32 Unicode encoding (litte-endian).
utf32be	The UTF-32 Unicode encoding (big-endian).
localeEncoding	The Unicode encoding of the current locale.
char8	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.

FileUtil.hs

import System.IO

main = 
    do
        putStrLn "Enter file name (Including full path) to write"
        fileName <- getLine
        fileHandle <- openFile fileName WriteMode
        endocoding <- mkTextEncoding "UTF-32LE"
        hSetEncoding fileHandle endocoding

        hPutStrLn fileHandle "我愛PTR"

        hClose fileHandle

        fileHandle <- openFile fileName ReadMode
        hSetEncoding fileHandle endocoding
        info <- hGetContents fileHandle

        putStrLn info

$ runghc FileUtil.hs
Enter file name (Including full path) to write
temp.txt
我愛PTR

When you open ‘temp.txt’ file in editor, you can see following information.

1162 0000 1b61 0000 5000 0000 5400 0000

5200 0000 0a00 0000

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