What is odbc-issue-49?

This repository is a minimal test case demonstrating a specific character encoding issue with ODBC database connections in Haskell. It exists to reproduce and illustrate a problem rather than serve as a tool you'd install and use. ODBC is a standard way for programs to talk to databases like SQL Server or PostgreSQL. When a Haskell program connects to a database through ODBC and retrieves text, there's a question of how characters are represented. This repo shows that the pound sign (£) comes back in two different forms depending on the column type: as a proper text character or as a raw byte sequence. The output in the README demonstrates this discrepancy side by side. The intended audience is likely the maintainer of a Haskell ODBC library or someone debugging a similar encoding mismatch. When a database stores Unicode characters like the pound sign, different column types may return data differently through ODBC, and this repo isolates that behavior so it can be discussed or fixed. It's the kind of project you'd create to accompany a bug report, small, focused, and showing exactly what happens when you run it. There's no real documentation beyond the terminal output itself, so you'd need to look at the Haskell source to understand which database it connects to and how the test table is set up. The project is built with Stack, which is a common Haskell build tool, but the README doesn't walk through setup steps or explain the broader context of the issue.