chr 232 doesn't return character è

Question

The evaluation of chr 232 returns '\232' instead of 'è'.

Of course, I expected (chr . ord) 'è' to return 'è'. Instead, I got '\232'

Could someone explain what's happening, here ?

Try `putStrLn [chr 232]`. Don't use `show` for `Char`s if you want to output the raw `Char` as-is. `print` implicitly calls `show`, and GHCi implicitly calls `print`. — chi, Mar 16 '21 at 18:56
Closely related: [*Semantics of show w.r.t. escape characters*](https://stackoverflow.com/q/48846437/2751851) — duplode, Mar 16 '21 at 19:10

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 16 '21 at 18:57

Haskell will show as representation of a character a backslash (\) followed with the decimal codepoint for most non-ASCII characters. The representation of a Char will also be surrounded with single quotes ('…').

If you want to print the content of a string, you can work with putChar :: Char -> IO ():

Prelude Data.Char> putChar (chr 232)
èPrelude Data.Char>

or you can wrap it in a singleton list and use putStrLn to print a line with that character:

Prelude Data.Char> putStrLn [chr 232]
è

chr 232 doesn't return character è

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