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String instance is broken with non-ASCII data

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#28 7 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
haskell
Domain
networking

Research direction

Start by tracing the String API helper paths for sending and receiving data, then inspect how each path handles the Content-Type header and character encoding. Compare the encoding used on both sides and identify where callers could control it; done means non-ASCII String data is handled consistently when sending and receiving without removing String instances.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Although the package works with String, and indeed encourages its use by having that be the default type in some of the API helper functions, the handling of non-ASCII data is completely broken. We should be doing encoding properly to be consistent with the Content-Type header, both when sending and receiving.

This has been reported by a couple of users so far and is clearly pretty nasty, but I don't think it's trivial to fix because presumably the receiving and sending sides can use different encodings and when sending requests we ought to be optionally giving the user control of the encoding.

The alternative of removing the String instances completely is likely to be very disruptive so I don't think it's a reasonable option.

Dominant language
Haskell
Stars
186
Forks
59
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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