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

[Chaddaï Fouché]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The semantics of (upTo n p) should be to parse at most n tokens, but if less
> than n tokens are available that should still be a successful parse. And the
> next token should be the first one upTo failed on.
> I attempted to use the "try" parser in various locations but that doesn't
> seem to help, or maybe I'm using it incorrectly.


First, you should probably use pattern matching rather than if for
your base case/recursive case distinction, it's clearer (at least most
Haskellers seems to think it is) :

> upTo 0 p = return []

second, option was conceived for these case where you want to try a
parser and returns something if it fail :

> upTo n p = option [] $ liftM2 (:) p (upTo (n-1) p)

Even then, be careful of putting a try before any multi-token parser
that could fail harmlessly during the upTo.

-- 
Jedaï