read package:basic-prelude

Parse Text to a value

Parsing of Strings, producing values. Derived instances of Read make the following assumptions, which derived instances of Show obey:

• If the constructor is defined to be an infix operator, then the derived Read instance will parse only infix applications of the constructor (not the prefix form).
• Associativity is not used to reduce the occurrence of parentheses, although precedence may be.
• If the constructor is defined using record syntax, the derived Read will parse only the record-syntax form, and furthermore, the fields must be given in the same order as the original declaration.
• The derived Read instance allows arbitrary Haskell whitespace between tokens of the input string. Extra parentheses are also allowed.

For example, given the declarations

infixr 5 :^:
data Tree a =  Leaf a  |  Tree a :^: Tree a

the derived instance of Read in Haskell 2010 is equivalent to

instance (Read a) => Read (Tree a) where

readsPrec d r =  readParen (d > app_prec)
(\r -> [(Leaf m,t) |
("Leaf",s) <- lex r,
(m,t) <- readsPrec (app_prec+1) s]) r

++ readParen (d > up_prec)
(\r -> [(u:^:v,w) |
(u,s) <- readsPrec (up_prec+1) r,
(":^:",t) <- lex s,
(v,w) <- readsPrec (up_prec+1) t]) r

where app_prec = 10
up_prec = 5

Note that right-associativity of :^: is unused. The derived instance in GHC is equivalent to

instance (Read a) => Read (Tree a) where

readPrec = parens $ (prec app_prec $ do
Ident "Leaf" <- lexP
m <- step readPrec
return (Leaf m))

+++ (prec up_prec $ do
u <- step readPrec
Symbol ":^:" <- lexP
v <- step readPrec
return (u :^: v))

where app_prec = 10
up_prec = 5

readListPrec = readListPrecDefault

Read a file and return the contents of the file as Text. The entire file is read strictly.

The readIO function is similar to read except that it signals parse failure to the IO monad instead of terminating the program.

The method readList is provided to allow the programmer to give a specialised way of parsing lists of values. For example, this is used by the predefined Read instance of the Char type, where values of type String should be are expected to use double quotes, rather than square brackets.

The readLn function combines getLine and readIO.

readParen True p parses what p parses, but surrounded with parentheses. readParen False p parses what p parses, but optionally surrounded with parentheses.

equivalent to readsPrec with a precedence of 0.

attempts to parse a value from the front of the string, returning a list of (parsed value, remaining string) pairs. If there is no successful parse, the returned list is empty. Derived instances of Read and Show satisfy the following:

• (x,"") is an element of (readsPrec d (showsPrec d x "")).

That is, readsPrec parses the string produced by showsPrec, and delivers the value that showsPrec started with.

A parser for a type a, represented as a function that takes a String and returns a list of possible parses as (a,String) pairs. Note that this kind of backtracking parser is very inefficient; reading a large structure may be quite slow (cf ReadP).