String in Haskell that supports UTF-16 and constant time indexing

Question

I know of bytestring, compactstring, text, and a bunch of other Haskell strings, but I did not find any that supports UTF-16 and constant time indexing, like bytestring does.

Does this exist?

Answer 1

The usual text interface doesn't support this because it's very rarely useful. However, the package maintainers have continued to use UTF-16 for years despite it being a silly encoding. Therefore, you might be justified in taking a gamble and importing Data.Text.Internal to get at the underlying Array . That said, this is so rarely the right thing to do that I suspect you may be asking the wrong question. Why do you need this?

Note: this question inspired me to file an issue suggesting that text switch to UTF-8. This will likely be denied, but I figured I should mention it.