24 Days of Hackage: text

Text processing is one of the many tasks in computer programming that seems like it should be simple, but in reality can be an absolute nightmare to get right. Programmers make assumptions about the characters they need to deal with, often forgetting about other scripts, and the volume of data you need to process rapidly increases so you also need libraries which are fast.

Bryan O’Sullivan’s text library is the current de facto library for handling human readable text. The text library consists of the Text type, and a comprehensive API for manipulating pieces of text efficiently. I’m not qualified to talk about the performance, but that’s OK - some great minds have already done this.

While performance is clearly excellent, its not the reason I chose to write about text . The real win of text for me is in the type. Text very clearly indicates that you are working with text, rather than arbitrary binary data. There are only a few ways to introduce Text values too - you either need a String , or you have to specifically decode to Text , for example with decodeUtf8 . This sounds so simple, and it is, but in my previous experience with Perl, forgetting to perform this vital step meant it was far too easy to treat over-the-wire data as text before it was decode. More often than not, this would lead to small explosions in other places much later.

This class of bugs is simply not possible anymore. If you assume you have human readable text then you have a Text value. If you don’t, GHC will be very happy to point that mistake out to you, and refuse to let you build your application until it is corrected.

Text provides a little more, but the basic API and the ability to encode and decide is likely where you’ll spend the majority of time. However, it’s almost Christmas, and one present just won’t do!

There are also a handful of packages on Hackage that provide even more text functionality. If you’ve ever done heavy text processing before then you’ve probably heard of the ICU library. Haskell bindings to ICU exist in the text-icu package, giving you the ability to perform unaccenting, collation and more.

Perhaps you didn’t find parsec so appealing, and would rather use regular expressions. I think you’re mad, but that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck - text-icu is one of a handful of regular expression packages that is capable of working with text .

The text library really is one of the most valuable libraries in on Hackage in my opinion, and thankfuly, not at the cost of speed of simplicity. It’s also part of the Haskell platform, so once you master this interface, your knowledge is extremely transferable.

You can contact me via email at ollie@ocharles.org.uk or tweet to me @acid2. I share almost all of my work at GitHub. This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.