Haskell HDBC-Sqlite3 always returns SqlByteString values

Question

I am using HDBC sqlite3 haskell driver to access local sqlite3 database which

PRAGMA encoding

is

UTF-8

And as result, for example for

SELECT id, title FROM some_table

I'm always getting the result like this:

[[SqlByteString "1", SqlByteString "\210\129\123\211"], ... ]

That's weird! Yes, title contains 'national' symbols and yes, I'm sure that id has type of INTEGER.

So the questions are:

1. Why 1 unicode symbol are threated as 2 ascii-like symbols?
2. Why integer columns results bytestring values?

Answer 1

SQLite is an untyped database, so the fields in your database don't really have a type at all. You should be converting them to a more Haskellish value by using fromSql or safeFromSql from Database.HDBC.SqlValue.