Binary (as opposed to textual) data is encountered in weird corners of the Haskell ecosystem. We tend to forget (for example) that the content recieved from a web server is not text until we convert it from UTF-8 (if that's what it is); and of course that glosses over the fact that something of content-type image/jpeg is not text in any way, shape, or form.

Bytes also show up when working with crypto algorithms, taking hashes, and when doing serialization to external binary formats. Although we frequently display these in terminals (and in URLs!) as text, but we take for granted that we have actually deserialized the data or rendered the it in hexidecimal or base64 or...

This module presents a simple wrapper around various representations of binary data to make it easier to interoperate with libraries supplying or consuming bytes.