[Haskell-cafe] ANN: format-0.1.0.0

[Scott Lawrence]

Hey all,

I've just uploaded to hackage format-0.1, a small library for handling format 
strings similar to those used by nginx's log_format directive. The idea is to 
allow easy parsing of text rendered with such a format string, to make parsing 
simple, automatically generated text files as easy as possible. So for 
example, if you want to parse lines consisting of two bits of text, separated 
by " -- ", then

     map (scanFormatString "$a -- $b") $ lines text

will do so, generating associative arrays with the variable names as keys and 
their content as values. A `renderFormatString` function, doing the obvious, 
is also provided.

Obligatory blog post with some more details: 
http://bytbox.net/blog/2012/05/format-haskell.html

I hope somebody finds this useful. (This seems the sort of thing which should 
already have existed, but I couldn't find anything. Did I miss it?)

I'm using parsec underneath, both for parsing the format string and the 
generated parser, and I've payed no attention to optimization. Some simple 
testing indicates that a reasonably fast computer takes about 1 second to 
parse 5000 lines with nginx's (and apache's) default format string - pretty 
slow. If there's demand, I'll be happy to pay more attention to that.

-- 
Scott Lawrence