[Haskell-cafe] Parsec to parse tree structures?

[david fries]

Yep, That's what I had in mind. Thanks for the link.

On Sun, 2010-03-14 at 19:09 +0000, Stephen Tetley wrote:
> Hi David
> 
> Ah ha - this form of binary file layout is quite common (e.g. PECOFF
> object files and OpenType / TrueType fonts).
> 
> Parsec and other parsing libraries are perhaps not ideal for the task,
> as they consume input as they parse. I have my own alternative to
> Parsec - Kangaroo [1] - for parsing binary files. It moves a cursor
> around inside the file (strictly speaking an array in memory from
> reading the file), so you can parse within a sub-region of the file
> and jump back out again.
> 
> Although its on Hackage, I wouldn't really recommend its use - its now
> fairly well documented but the API is not stable and I only work on it
> sporadically. Because I didn't want any dependencies, the package is
> quite a bit larger than it need be - if someone were interested in
> technique they might be better off using it as a start point. The most
> important bits are the 'intraparse' function and the monadic machinery
> inside the Kangaroo.ParseMonad module.
> 
> Even when a binary format has a published standard, unfortunately the
> standard might not be detailed enough to actually produce a parser.
> This is the case for True Type and PECOFF which I wrote Kangaroo for,
> and as I don't have much enthusiasm for deriving a parser from another
> open-source implementation, its rather stalling any continued
> development of Kangaroo.
> 
> 
> [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/kangaroo
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Stephen
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