Text.GenPrintF

http://okmij.org/ftp/typed-formatting/FPrintScan.html#print-show

Generic polyvariadic printf in Haskell98

This generalization of Text.Printf.printf is inspired by the message of Evan Klitzke, who wrote on Haskell-Cafe about frequent occurrences in his code of the lines like

        infoM $ printf "%s saw %s with %s" (show x) (show y) (show z)

Writing show on and on quickly becomes tiresome. It turns out, we can avoid these repeating show, still conforming to Haskell98.

Our polyvariadic generic printf is like polyvariadic show with the printf-like format string. Our printf handles values of any present and future type for which there is a Show instance. For example:

        t1 = unR $ printf "Hi there"
        -- "Hi there"

        t2 = unR $ printf "Hi %s!" "there"
        -- "Hi there!"

        t3 = unR $ printf "The value of %s is %s" "x" 3
        -- "The value of x is 3"

        t4 = unR $ printf "The value of %s is %s" "x" [5]
        -- "The value of x is [5]"

The unsightly unR appears solely for Haskell98 compatibility: flexible instances remove the need for it. On the other hand, Evan Klitzke's code post-processes the result of formatting with infoM, which can subsume unR.

A bigger problem with our generic printf, shared with the original Text.Printf.printf, is partiality: The errors like passing too many or too few arguments to printf are caught only at run-time. We can certainly do better.

Version: The current version is 1.1, June 5, 2009.

References

• The complete source code with the tests. It was published in the message posted on the Haskell-Cafe mailing list on Fri, 5 Jun 2009 00:57:00 -0700 (PDT) http://okmij.org/ftp/typed-formatting/GenPrintF.hs

Documentation

newtype RString

Needed only for the sake of Haskell98 If we are OK with flexible instances, this newtype can be disposed of

Constructors

RString

Fields

unR :: String

Instances

SPrintF RString

These two instances are all we ever need

class SPrintF r where

Methods

pr_aux :: [FDesc] -> [String] -> r

Instances

SPrintF RString

These two instances are all we ever need

(Show a, SPrintF r) => SPrintF (a -> r)

data FDesc

A very simple language of format descriptors

Constructors

FD_lit String

FD_str

Instances

Eq FDesc

Show FDesc

convert_to_fdesc :: String -> [FDesc]