[Haskell-cafe] Troubles understanding Parsec Error Handling

[Kevin Charter]

Hi Matthias,

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Matthias Hörmann <mhoermann at gmail.com>wrote:

> parseTest (do; r1 <- anyOf ["Hello", "Hallo", "Foo", "HallofFame"]; r2 <-
> string "bla"; return (r1, r2)) "Hallofbla"
>
> which prints this:
>
> parse error at (line 1, column 8):unknown parse error
>
> And my question about this is made up of two parts
>
> 1. Why doesn't it print my "unexpected" message but instead says unknown
> parse error
> 2. Why is the location in the text off (I would expect it to fail at
> column 6 (first character beyond the result it could return) or 7 (first
> character that makes the string no prefix of any acceptable string)
>

What version of parsec 3 are you using? In version 3.1.1, I get (using
Text.Parsec.String instead of Text.Parsec.Text):

parse error at (line 1, column 1):
unexpected "Hallofb", expecting one of ["Hello","Hallo","Foo","HallofFame"]

which is what I would have expected, bearing in mind that 'try p' pretends
that it hasn't consumed input when 'p' fails.

I don't think you need to use 'try' in your 'anyOf' function, but you'll
have to change it to handle seeing the end of input if the one-character
look-ahead fails.

Kevin
-- 
Kevin Charter
kevin.charter at acm.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20120530/2753d194/attachment.htm>