[Haskell-cafe] (Newbie Question) How to get the value of an "IO String" Monad?

[Cale Gibbard]

Hi,

Apart from the other posts, you might also want to read
http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/IntroductionToIO which is a quick intro
to the way IO is handled in Haskell and
http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/UsingIo which covers similar ground, but
which also goes into a number of other common questions.

 - Cale

On 17/02/06, Peter <peter at commonlawgov.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> For the purpose of familiarizing myself with Haskell, and also because I
> love Haskell :),
> I am trying to re-make a script that I made in Python that sends a
> request to a server and extracts the list of email addresses from a
> Mailman web-page by using an XML Parser on the page's HTML that has been
> converted to XHTML by "HTML Tidy".
>
> However, I cannot seem to figure out a way to get the state of a Monad;
> Specifically I cannot get the value of an "IO String" Monad.
>
> I have read some tutorials on Monads but I guess I must have missed
> something.
>
> I have read that the >>= operator is the only way to extract the state
> of an action as a string, and pipe it to a function. So far so good.
> But, That does not seem to work, because as I understand the >>=
> operator, it expects the function on the right hand side to return an IO
> Monad, which completely defeats the purpose here.
>
> So, How am I supposed to get the value of an IO Monad, such as "IO
> String", without returning an IO Monad?
>
> If this is of any help, here is the function I am stuck on:
> recv_headers' :: Socket.Socket -> String -> IO [[String]]
> recv_headers' sock bulk
>     | received == ""            = error "Connection died unexpectedly."
>     | received == "\n"
>       && endswith bulk "\r\n\r" = return [["foo", "bar"]]
>     | otherwise                 = recv_headers' sock (bulk ++ received)
>     where received = (Socket.recv sock 1)
> --- End code ---
>
> And here is the (expected) error I get from trying to compare "IO
> String" to "String":
> MemberBackup.hs:29:18:
>     Couldn't match `IO String' against `[Char]'
>       Expected type: IO String
>       Inferred type: [Char]
>     In the second argument of `(==)', namely `""'
>     In a pattern guard for
>        the definition of `recv_headers'':
>         received == ""
> Failed, modules loaded: none.
> --- End error ---
>
> Thanks for the help,
> Peter
>
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