[Haskell-cafe] how to get started: a text application

[Max Ischenko]

Hi all,

I'm going to try to implement a version of Markdown tool[1] in Haskell. 
The application is rather simple: take a text file with some (simple) 
mark-up embedded in it and turn it into another text file, this time 
with XHTML markup.

I need some guidelines on how to get started. I'll have to struggle with 
both the language itself (as I am a newcomer) plus with libraries that I 
may need.

If I to do this in some convenient language, like Python, I'd use a 
lexer to parse the input, a state machine to build some internal 
representation and some serializer to write this into XHTML.

Which approaches could you suggest for that kind of application in 
Haskell? I'd especially glad to hear about some "idiomatic" or "native" 
ways to solve the problem.

I've made a quick search and found tools like Parsec, HaXML, Happy and 
WASH/HTML. Not sure which ones I'll need.

[1] - http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

TIA,
max.