[Haskell-beginners] Help! Trapped in the IO Monad!

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Alexander Dunlap wrote:

> It seems like foldM ought to do what you want. Could you post some
> more details please?

This is a function that I have working in Ocaml which is a little
more lenient about IO :-).

This is what I have but won't compile:

    fileNames :: ([FilePath] -> FilePath -> FilePath -> [FilePath])
                  -> [FilePath] -> FilePath -> IO [FilePath]
    fileNames builder builder_accum topdir = do
        names <- getDirectoryContents topdir
        let properNames = filter (`notElem` [".", ".."]) names
        (dirs, files) <- splitDirFile properNames
        let accum <- foldl' (\ acc f -> builder acc topdir f) builder_accum files
        return $ foldM (\ acc d -> fileNames builder accum (topdir </> d)) accum dirs

I get following error on the foldM:

    Couldn't match expected type `[FilePath]'
           against inferred type `IO [FilePath]'
      Expected type: IO [FilePath]
      Inferred type: IO (IO [FilePath])

Thinking about it some more, I can see the problem; accum is an
"IO [FilePath]" and my builder function requires a "[FilePath]".

Once I get the function working I would like to generalize it to:

    fileNames :: (a -> FilePath -> FilePath -> a) -> a -> FilePath -> IO a

Cheers,
Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
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