Effective Haskell

Revisiting the Parsing Problem

We’ve dealt with parsing several times in this book, most recently in the previous chapter where we focused on building a parser to extract data created by our FilePack tool. In all of these examples, we’ve addressed the parsing problems we were trying to solve specifically, tailoring our code to the particular application we wanted to build. Narrowly focusing on a particular problem let us keep the size of our application small, but it also meant that we’ve re-written similar code several times. That’s a good indication that we might want to look at ways that we can abstract away parts of the problem to avoid rework in the future.

Let’s start thinking about how we can abstract away parts of a parser by re-visiting ...