[Haskell-beginners] doc on accessing C struct binary data

[Sean Perry]

On Sat, 2010-07-31 at 17:05 -0400, Dean Herington wrote:
> At 11:40 PM -0700 7/30/10, Sean Perry wrote:
> >I would like to read C structs that have been written to disk as binary
> >data. Is there a reference on doing this somewhere. The IO is not too
> >hard, but how do I mimic the C struct in Haskell and still honor the
> >exact sizes of the various struct members?
> 
> At 9:11 AM +0100 7/31/10, Stephen Tetley wrote:
> >Hi Sean
> >
> >Commonly people would use Data.Word and Data.Int to get sized
> >integrals. There's no corresponding sized types for floats - if you're
> >lucky your serialized C Structs won't use floats otherwise you'll have
> >to dig out a reference manual to see how they are laid out.
> >
> >To actually read C-structs Data.Binary.Get should provide the
> >primitives you need (getWord8, getWord16le, getWord16be, ...), you'll
> >then have to assemble a parser using these primitives to read your
> >struct.
> >
> >You might have to pay some attention to alignment - the C struct might
> >be laid out with elements on byte boundaries (usually 4-byte) rather
> >than directly adjacent. I suspect alignment is compiler dependent, its
> >a long time since I looked at this but I believe C99 has pragmas to
> >direct the compiler on alignment.
> >
> >Best wishes
> >
> >Stephen
> 
> I would recommend using hsc2hs instead, as it avoids having to 
> emulate the C compiler, which is tedious and error-prone.  (See 
> section 10.3 of the GHC User's Guide.)  In a nutshell, you write (the 
> necessary parts of) your program in a modestly extended Haskell.  In 
> an .hsc file you can #include C header files (no need to duplicate 
> that code in Haskell!) and bring selected pieces of the C world 
> (types, field offsets, ...) into Haskell.  The hsc2hs translator 
> actually creates a C program from your .hsc file that, when executed, 
> writes your .hs file, incorporating the needed knowledge from C land.
> 
> Dean

Sounds like what I am looking for, thanks!