[Haskell-cafe] HaXmL and the IO Monad

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 02:53:04PM +0000, John Goerzen wrote:
> I've been playing with HaXmL lately.  I've had a need to convert one XML
> document to another, and HaXmL was very nice for that.
> 
> Along the way, I've discovered that I need to do some I/O as part of the
> conversion (specifically due to timezone-related calculations).  Much of
> HaXML is based around the CFilter type:
> 
> type CFilter = Content -> [Content]
> 
> That is, most of the stuff one does in HaXML is a function with that
> type.
> 
> Try as I might, I could not figure out a nice way to integrate I/O into
> this system.  A simple IO CFilter wouldn't work, since there has to be
> input available when it runs.  Content -> IO [Content] didn't work
> either, since the IO ripples up all the way to the top, messing up the
> nice code everywhere.

If the timezone-related stuff is simple enough, you could perhaps use a
function

create_my_cfilter :: IO CFilter

which does IO stuff to find the timezone, and then returns a pure function
that uses that TZ info.
-- 
David Roundy
http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/