I agree that it seems uncomfortable for a seemingly pure function to require handling exceptions in the IO monad, but if the code in question really does have the capability of raising IO exceptions, then I think it is reasonable to consider it as impure and belonging in the IO monad and that it probably should not have been given a pure type signature to start with. I'd double check to see if the function in question has the capability of raising an exception in a more pure monad as per Kees's suggestion. The other option is to perform the actions I've suggested and then wrap the whole lot in unsafePerformIO to make it pure again but with a new signature of (a -> Either YourException b), however that just makes me feel even more queazy...

Other than that, I guess we'd need a snippet of the code and what libraries are being used in order to provide better help.

Good luck!


On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 4:07 AM, Kees Bleijenberg <k.bleijenberg@lijbrandt.nl> wrote:

Lyndon,

You wrote:
You can turn anything into an IO action with return, or you could catch the exception at a level where you are performing IO. Would this be what you're after?

Wait until you perform IO, seems quit uneasy to me and why? Converting a string to a typeable is not a IO action. Problem is that this function lives in a dll. The IO is done by the calling program (not a Haskell program). The function is not in a monad, it is a pure function. So I think I can’t do a return.

Kees

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Kees Bleijenberg <k.bleijenberg@lijbrandt.nl> wrote:

The app I’am working on, converts a jsonString to another string encoding.

The function I want to write is  jsonString -> (encoding, errorMsg)  so String-> (String, String)

For this purpose I have a typeable datastructure Glass. Because it is typeable I can do (decodeJSON jsonString) :: Glass

But sometimes the jsonString is not valid (misformed or wrong fields). decodeJSON then throws a exception.  I want to

catch that exection and transform the result to something like (“” , theErrorMsg). Unfortunately all catch functions want IO parameters.

What can I do?

 

Kees

 


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