Dear Malcom, thanks for helping. I had actually come to Haskell originally because of a parsing problem. I had been using Smalltalk until I started a project which required parsing files. Until then I had not done any RW parsing. Well the route was more a Parsec -> Haskell, wtf is Haskell? Anyway eventually I dropped Smalltalk and got addicted to Haskell. And managed familiarize myself with Haskell and Parsec, the latter as it turned out I didn't even need to solve my original problem. Anyway polyparse certainly is an option, but there are a few things that despite my "list of failures" to use it give uu-parsinglib a special appeal, the breadth-first approach with choice, I find that terrible elegant. Due to some kicks in my behind it seems that I might be able to use Doaitse's combinators now, some more details on that are in another post. Günther Malcolm Wallace schrieb:
It is my pleasure to announce that after 5 days of experimenting with uu-parsinglib I have absolutely no clue, whatsoever, on how to use it.
I do not even manage to write a parser for even a mere digit or a simple character.
I don't know whether you will be willing to change over to polyparse library, but here are some hints about how you might use it.
Given that you want the input to be a simple character stream, rather than use a more elaborate lexer, the first thing to do is to specialise the parser type for your purposes:
type TextParser a = Parser Char a
Now, to recognise a "mere digit",
digit :: TextParser Char digit = satisfy Char.isDigit
and for a sequence of digits forming an unsigned integer:
integer :: TextParser Integer integer = do ds <- many1 digit return (foldl1 (\n d-> n*10+d) (map (fromIntegral.digitToInt) ds)) `adjustErr` (++("expected one or more digits"))
I mean I'd like to be able to turn "12.05.2009" into something like (12, 5, 2009) and got no clue what the code would have to look like. I do know almost every variation what the code must not look like :).
date = do a <- integer satisfy (=='.') b <- integer satisfy (=='.') c <- integer return (a,b,c)
Of course, that is just the standard (strict) monadic interface used by many combinator libraries. Your original desire was for lazy parsing, and to achieve that, you must move over to the applicative interface. The key difference is that you cannot name intermediate values, but must construct larger values directly from smaller ones by something like function application.
lazydate = return (,,) `apply` integer `discard` dot `apply` integer `discard` dot `apply` integer where dot = satisfy (=='.')
The (,,) is the constructor function for triples. The `discard` combinator ensures that its second argument parses OK, but throws away its result, keeping only the result of its first argument.
Apart from lazy space behaviour, the main observable difference between "date" and "lazydate" is when errors are reported on incorrect input. For instance:
fst $ runParser date "12.05..2009" *** Exception: In a sequence: Parse.satisfy: failed expected one or more digits
fst $ runParser lazydate "12.05..2009" (12,5,*** Exception: In a sequence: Parse.satisfy: failed expected one or more digits
Notice how the lazy parser managed to build the first two elements of the triple, whilst the strict parser gave no value at all.
I know that the error messages shown here are not entirely satisfactory, but they can be improved significantly just by making greater use of the `adjustErr` combinator in lots more places (it is rather like Parsec's ). Errors containing positional information about the input can be constructed by introducing a separate lexical tokenizer, which is also not difficult.
Regards, Malcolm