[Haskell-cafe] Lazy IO.

[Sebastiaan Visser]

On Jun 14, 2008, at 6:49 PM, Isaac Dupree wrote:

> Sebastiaan Visser wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I've got a question about lazy IO in Haskell. The most well known
>> function to do lazy IO is the `hGetContents', which lazily reads  
>> all the
>> contents from a handle and returns this as a regular [Char].
>> The thing with hGetContents is that is puts the Handle in a semi- 
>> closed
>> state, no one can use the handle anymore. This behaviour is
>> understandable from the point of safety; it is not yet determined  
>> when
>> the result of hGetContents will actually be computed, using the  
>> handle
>> in the meantime is undesirable.
>> The point is, I think I really have a situation in which I want to  
>> use
>> the handle again `after' a call to hGetContents. I think I can best
>> explain this using a code example.
>>   readHttpMessage :: IO (Headers, Data.ByteString.Lazy.ByteString)
>>   readHttpMessage = do
>>     myStream <- <accept http connection from client>
>>     request <- hGetContents myStream
>>     header <- parseHttpHeader request
>>     bs <- Data.ByteString.Lazy.hGetContents myStream
>>     return (header, body)
>
> that's impure because parseHttpHeader doesn't return anything  
> telling you how much of the stream it's looked at.  Maybe it looked  
> ahead more than it needed to, thus deleting part of the body.  I  
> was going to suggest, if you can't change parseHttpHeader to use  
> ByteStrings,
>
> >     bs <- Data.ByteString.Lazy.hGetContents myStream
> >     header <- parseHttpHeader (Data.ByteString.Lazy.unpack bs)
>
> but you still have to get parseHttpHeader (or perhaps if it has  
> similar friends) to tell you how much of the string it consumed!  I  
> don't know what parsing functions you have available to work with,  
> so I can't tell you whether it's possible.

It is a regular Parsec parser and I am pretty sure it does not  
consume anything other than the header itself. Maybe I could rewrite  
my parser to work on Word8's instead of Char's, I don't think HTTP  
even allows Unicode characters within HTTP headers.

Thanks. I think I'll try this.

But I'm still curious about how to lazily parse messages with  
arbitrary size Unicode headers and plain (possibly) binary bodies.

> -Isaac

--
Sebastiaan.