[Haskell-cafe] Parsing of bytestrings with non-String errors?

[Magnus Therning]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 00:39, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> My thoughts went more like a parser type like
>>
>>    data Parser e a = ...
>
> Yes, I knew that's where you were going :-)
> The trouble is, you'd still have to deal with
> fail :: Monad m => String -> m a
> which would require your failure type to somehow accept a string. Plumbing
> that in would be a little more awkward than your initial exporations suggest
> :-\
> You have two problems. The first is how to construct a value of your failure
> type that accepts a String parameter so that you can support users of
> "fail". The second is that you might need to pass extra information to
> construct your failure value when naïve code uses fail or mzero, otherwise
> you will only get useful error values out quite infrequently.

Yes, I suspected there'd be something I had missed.

I guess it'd would require 'Parser e a' to have a 'fail' that's
similar to the one in 'Maybe'.  Users would then be forced to use
'<?>' to get useful error info out.  Would that be an unworkable
situation?

>> I still haven't convinced myself that this will work though.  Also, I had
>> a
>> look at attoparsec on bitbucket, and there are some major changes between
>> 0.7
>> and 0.8.
>
> Even though those changes represent a major modification to the internals of
> attoparsec, they shouldn't really affect what you want to do, or anything
> interesting about how to do it.

Ah, that's good.  I think I'll have to postpone any work on this for
now though, and instead implement a 'String -> MyErrorType' function
for, hopefully, temporary use.  I've already been sidetracked twice
before ;-)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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