An efficient packed, immutable Unicode text type (both strict and lazy). The Text type represents Unicode character strings, in a time and space-efficient manner. This package provides text processing capabilities that are optimized for performance critical use, both in terms of large data quantities and high speed. The Text type provides character-encoding, type-safe case conversion via whole-string case conversion functions (see Data.Text). It also provides a range of functions for converting Text values to and from ByteStrings, using several standard encodings (see Data.Text.Encoding). Efficient locale-sensitive support for text IO is also supported (see Data.Text.IO). These modules are intended to be imported qualified, to avoid name clashes with Prelude functions, e.g. To use an extended and very rich family of functions for working with Unicode text (including normalization, regular expressions, non-standard encodings, text breaking, and locales), see the text-icu package based on the well-respected and liberally licensed ICU library.