[Haskell-cafe] Bencoding in Haskell

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On 4/20/05, Tommi Airikka <haskell-cafe at airikka.net> wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I was just wondering if there are any good ways to represent a bencoded
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bencoding) message in Haskell? Any
> suggestions?
> 

Not that I know of, but it should be very easy to write a parser using
the parser library Parsec.

You'll need a datatype, something like this:

data Bencode = BEInteger Integer | 
                        BEString String | 
                        BEList [Bencode] | 
                        BEDictionary (Data.Map String Bencode)
                        deriving (Show, Eq)

Which should be sufficient to represent any Bencoded message (if I
didn't make a misstake).
Then you could probably use the standard char-parser in parsec to
parse it quite easily. Read the docs, they're quite straightforward.

I'm a bit rusty but something like this:

-- just parse an integer, parsec might have one of these already
number :: Parser Integer
number = 
  do n_str <- many1 digit -- parse a number
       let n = read n_str      -- convert to an Int
       return n                   -- return the number

beString :: Parser Bencode
beString =
  do n <- number                 -- the length prefix
      char ':'                          -- now a ':'
      str <- count n anyChar   -- and now n number of letters
      return (BEString str)       -- return the string wrapped up as a
BEString

beInt :: Parser Bencode
beInt =
  do char 'i'
       n <- number
       char 'e'
       return n

-- parse any Bencoded value
beParse :: Parser Bencode
beParse =
  do beInt <|> beString <|> beDictionary <|> beList

beList :: Parser Bencode
beList =
  do char 'l'
       xs <- many beParse -- parse many bencoded values
       char 'e'
       return (BEList xs)

beDictionary :: Parser Bencode
beDictionary =
  do char 'd'
       key <- beString
       val <- beParse
       m <- beDictionary <|> char 'e' >> return Data.Map.empty
       return (Data.Map.insert key val m)

-- main parser function
parseBencoded :: String -> Maybe Bencode
parseBencode str = case parse beParse "" str of
                                 Left err -> Nothing
                                 Right val -> Just val



Note: This is all untested code that I just scribbled down real quick.
There's probably tons of misstakes, but you should get the picture.
Read the Parsec docs and then write your own.


/S
-- 
Sebastian Sylvan
+46(0)736-818655
UIN: 44640862