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

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> 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.

You might be able to use haskell-src-exts (plus a little bit of
preprocessing) to parse the declarations. I deliberately tried to
follow Haskell syntax where possible.

>> > 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 :-)

Writing a converting from text files to XML is fine by me - Hoogle
already has the textual format parser, so if you add a patching adding
a dump XML option I'll happily apply.

I'll send you the .txt files by private email. It seems like you want
them now, but don't care about keeping them up to date, since it's
only a demo. Hence fast and quick, but not long term provided, seems a
good short-term compromise.

Thanks

Neil