[Haskell-beginners] Re: parsing upto n items with parsec

[Christian Maeder]

Ashish Agarwal schrieb:
> Hi. I'm just learning Parsec and Haskell. It is a great library, and I
> see how "many" lets you parse 0 or more items, "many1" parses 1 or more
> items, and "count" parses exactly n items. However, there is no
> combinator that parses between m and n items. What would be the best
> implementation for this?

I would write an "upTo" parser with the same type as "count" that parses
not exactly but at most n items. Your desired parser is than the
concatenated results of "count m p" and "upTo (n - m) p" (achieved by
"liftM2 (++)").

For "upTo" a recursive definition seems best (other may come up with
tricky combinator application.) "upTo 0 p" (or something less than 0)
returns "[]" and "upTo n p" is an "option [] ..." parser of one "p"
result followed by the "upTo (n - 1) p" result:

"option [] (liftM2 (:) p (upTo (n - 1) p))"

HTH Christian

Another possibility is to use "many" and check if the resulting list has
the desired length (if not fail), but that may consume too many tokens
that subsequent parsers are supposed to consume.