[Haskell-cafe] Hoogle: converting binary .hoo into text?

[Peter Verswyvelen]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Peter,
>
> > I would like to use the Hoogle text format in C#.
>
> Out of curiosity, why? I'm just interested to know what work you're doing.


Sure. We're building with a graphical representation of a Haskellish
language (a tiny subset of Haskell actually). The target audience is
graphical artists and designers. For testing, I would like to populate the
library with primitives taken from the Haskell base libraries.  I tried
using the GHC API for it, but got stuck. I got the advice in #haskell to
parse the Hoogle format, which indeed looks simple enough for the task.

> Hoogle on Hackage comes with a bunch of binary *.hoo files. Can these be
> > converted to text/xml? If not, is the binary format documented?
>
> The binary format is documented in the code, and there is a show command.
> Try:
>
> hoogle +base --dump
>
> However the binary format is not an encoding of the text format, it
> throws away lots of data, and precomputes interesting tables etc. If
> you want the original, the binary is probably not that useful.
>
> I do have a complete set of text files though. I can upload them to
> the Hoogle website, or I can distribute them with the hackage package.
> I could just email them to you privately. What seems the best option
> for everyone?


I'm not everyone but I guess it would be useful in general. From within
Haskell, ideally one would just use the GHC API (or Cabal API) to extract
all information I guess, but for usage in other languages, an easy to parse
format is better no? (maybe even XML, but that is bulky :-)

> I know I can build hoo files using "cabal haddock --hoogle". But doing
> this
> > on the BASE package (which I need) from Hackage fails (I'm on Windows,
> using
> > MSYS):
> > configure: creating ./config.status
> > config.status: error: cannot find input file: include/HsBaseConfig.h.in
> > Does anyone have an easy solution? Maybe I just need to switch to Linux
> to
> > get this working? :-)
>
> I have a small pile of hacks to get the base library building with
> Hoogle. You are welcome to look at them (data/generate in the Hoogle
> repo). Caution: these hacks may make your eyes bleed, and certainly
> won't work for anything but the GHC/base version pair that I last did
> it on.
>
> Thanks
>
> Neil
>
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