heap profile character encoding confusion

Heap profiling this UTF-8 source file (where ø is encoded as C3 B8) with ghc-7.0.3 on GNU/Linux with LANG=en_GB.utf8 seems to give an output .hp file in ISO-8859 encoding (where ø is encoded as F8).

føb :: Integer -> Integer
føb n
  | n == 0 = 0
  | n == 1 = 1
  | n >= 2 = føb (n - 1) + føb (n - 2)

main :: IO ()
main = print (føb 100)

hexdump extract from .hp file:

00000000  28 32 39 33 29 66 f8 62  2f 43 41 46 3a 6c 76 6c  |(293)f.b/CAF:lvl|
00000010  31 5f 72 50 70 09 34 30  0a                       |1_rPp.40.|
00000019

This causes some problems for heap profile visualization programs:

• hp2ps: viewing the .ps in evince shows a wrong character (slashed-l instead of ø)
• hp2pretty: viewing the .svg with rsvg aborts with an invalid utf8 error

hp2any-core seemed to handle the character encoding correctly in this test (displayed as "\248") with correct appearance in hp2any-graph's OpenGL window.

I'd like to know if ISO-8859 will always be used for .hp files, or if the ISO-8859 is a misfeature and UTF-8 will be used in future, or if it will eventually use the current locale settings.

I didn't find any documentation on character encoding here: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/prof-heap.html

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	7.0.3
Type	Bug
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	Documentation
Test case
Differential revisions
BlockedBy
Related
Blocking
CC	claudiusmaximus@goto10.org
Operating system
Architecture