[Haskell-cafe] How to tie knots in XML-style data structures

[Simon Jakobi]

Hi Auke,

I have admittedly only skimmed your email, but your problem reminds me
of a talk by Joachim Breitner.

A German transcript of the talk is available here:
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/publications/MonadFix_HaL10_2015-12-04.pdf

I hope this is useful to you!
Simon

2017-01-02 15:08 GMT+01:00 Auke Booij <auke at tulcod.com>:
> I am reading an XML file, where some nodes have attributes that refer
> to other nodes. For example:
>
> <blah name="first" type="5">
>  <yada blah="second"></yada>
> </blah>
> <blah name="second" type="3">
> </blah>
>
> Here, the point is that the inner <yada> refers to a <blah> that is
> not its parent by means of a "blah" attribute. But there might also be
> a mistake in the XML file, which I would then want to report: the
> inner <yada> might refer to a <blah> which does not exist.
>
> Using an XML parsing library, this XML file can easily be read into a
> data type such as the following:
>
> data Blah = Blah {blahName :: String, blahType :: Int, blahYadas :: [Yada]}
> data Yada = Yada {yadaBlah :: String}
>
> But for my application, it is useful to have the Yadas refer back to
> actual Blahs, instead of just their name Strings. So I'd like to parse
> the XML into the following data structure:
>
> data Blah' = Blah' {blah'Name :: String, blah'Type :: Int, blah'Yadas
> :: [Yada']}
> data Yada' = Yada' {yada'Blah :: Blah}
>
> (the only change is the type of yada'Bla from String to Blah)
>
> 1. How can I write a function that takes a Blah, and outputs a Blah',
> and reports a nice error when there is no <blah> with the name
> specified in the <yada>? Can it be done at all without using partial
> functions like fromJust (when using Maybe to "report" errors)?
>
> 2. Is there a better way to define the types Blah, Yada, Blah' and
> Yada' (e.g. with less repetition)? After all, all I'm changing is the
> type of one field, but I end up having to redefine all my types.
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