[Haskell-cafe] Re: Abstraction leak

[Andrew Coppin]

apfelmus wrote:
> Andrew Coppin wrote:
>   
>> OK, I'm stuck now. :-S
>>
>> 1. How do I run the input through parseRLE and *then* through
>> parseHuffmanTable?
>>
>> 2. How do I get parseHuffmanPayload to continue from where parseRLE left
>> off? (How do I get parseRLE to not parse the entire input, for that
>> matter...)
>>     
>
> Well, there's no way to do that with a monolithic parseRLE since it will
> parse the input to the bitter end. But assuming that
>
>   parseRLE = concat `liftM` many parseRLEBlock
>
>   parseRLEBlock :: Parser Word8 [Word8]
>
> you can write an RLE parser that repeatedly parses RLE blocks until it
> has read equal or more than n Word8s
>
>   parseRLEAmount n
>      | n <= 0    = return []
>      | otherwise = do
>         xs  <- parseRLEBlock
>         xss <- parseRLEAmount (n - length xs)
>         return (xs ++ xss)
>
> To parse a huffman table, run the actual parser on the result of
> parseRLEAmount:
>
>   parseHuffmanHeader =
>     runParser parseHuffmanTable `liftM` parseRLEAmount (2^8)
>   

The use of lifeM is *inspired* - I would never have thought of writing 
it infix!

Still, while this does solve the issue at hand, I'm still left wondering 
whether there's any way to make this work for some arbitrary parser. 
parseHuffmanTable always uses exactly N bytes of input, but what if it 
didn't? What if it was impossible to tell how many bytes it should read 
without actually running it? How would you implement that? Nice a since 
general solution exist?