parsec

Monadic parser combinators

https://github.com/haskell/parsec

Version on this page:3.1.14.0
LTS Haskell 23.23:3.1.17.0
Stackage Nightly 2025-05-19:3.1.18.0
Latest on Hackage:3.1.18.0

See all snapshots parsec appears in

BSD-3-Clause licensed by Daan Leijen, Paolo Martini, Antoine Latter
Maintained by Herbert Valerio Riedel
This version can be pinned in stack with:parsec-3.1.14.0@sha256:9f35f3a6ae66c6e1c22a1b84e62731f1501057791ffb2554f710aa08c7a4d651,4211

Module documentation for 3.1.14.0

Depends on 4 packages(full list with versions):
base, bytestring, mtl, text

Parsec Build Status

Please refer to the package description on Hackage for more information.

A monadic parser combinator library, written by Daan Leijen. Parsec is designed from scratch as an industrial-strength parser library. It is simple, safe, well documented, has extensive libraries, good error messages, and is fast.

Some links:

By analyzing Parsec’s reverse dependencies on Hackage we can find open source project that make use of Parsec. For example bibtex, ConfigFile, csv and hjson.

Getting started

This requires a working version of cabal and ghci, which are part of any modern installation of Haskell, such as Haskell Platform.

First install Parsec.

cabal install parsec

Below we show how a very simple parser that tests matching parentheses was made from GHCI (the interactive GHC environment), which we started with the ghci command).

Prelude> :m +Text.Parsec
Prelude Text.Parsec> let parenSet = char '(' >> many parenSet >> char ')' :: Parsec String () Char
Loading package transformers-0.3.0.0 ... linking ... done.
Loading package array-0.5.0.0 ... linking ... done.
Loading package deepseq-1.3.0.2 ... linking ... done.
Loading package bytestring-0.10.4.0 ... linking ... done.
Loading package mtl-2.1.3.1 ... linking ... done.
Loading package text-1.1.1.3 ... linking ... done.
Loading package parsec-3.1.5 ... linking ... done.
Prelude Text.Parsec> let parens = (many parenSet >> eof) <|> eof
Prelude Text.Parsec> parse parens "" "()"
Right ()
Prelude Text.Parsec> parse parens "" "()(())"
Right ()
Prelude Text.Parsec> parse parens "" "("
Left (line 1, column 2):
unexpected end of input
expecting "(" or ")"

The Right () results indicate successes: the parentheses matched. The Left [...] result indicates a parse failure, and is detailed with an error message.

For a more thorough introduction to Parsec we recommend the links at the top of this README file.

Contributing

Issues (bugs, feature requests or otherwise feedback) may be reported in the Github issue tracker for this project.

Pull-requests are also welcome.

License

See the LICENSE file in the repository.

Changes

3.1.14.0

  • Add parseFromFile to Text.Parsec.Text.Lazy and Text.Parsec.Text (#103, #104).

  • Clarify Haddock documentation in various places (#105,#101,#102).

  • Add support for base-4.13.

3.1.13.0

  • Add official support for SafeHaskell

    NOTE: This is the first version whose SafeHaskell properties have become an intentional part of the API contract; previous versions were merely accidentally safe-inferred (or not depending on various factors; in other words, this was a fragile property). If you rely on SafeHaskell to consider module imports from parsec safe, this is the first version of parsec which actually guarantees a well-defined state; you can declare this requirement by either specifying

      build-depends: parsec >= 3.1.13.0 && < 3.2

    or, starting with cabal-version:2.0, via

      build-depends: parsec ^>= 3.1.13.0

  • Drop support for GHC 7.0, GHC 7.2, and GHC 7.4.1; support window starts with GHC 7.4.2.

3.1.12.0

  • Support limited to GHC 7.0 & GHC 7.2 only

  • Add MonadFail instance for ParsecT

  • Add Semigroup/Monoid instances for ParsecT (#80,#82)

  • Fix space leak in Applicative/Monad interface (#37)

  • Add parserTrace and parserTraced combinators for debugging.

3.1.11

  • Include README.md in package.

3.1.10

  • Most types now have a Typeable instance. Some instances are dropped from older versions of GHC (sorry about that!).
  • The token-parser now rejects Unicode numeric escape sequences for characters outside the Unicode range.
  • The token-parser now loses less precision when parsing literal doubles.
  • Documentation fixes and corrections.
  • We no longer test parsec builds on GHC 7.4.

3.1.9

  • Many and various updates to documentation and package description (inlcuding the homepage links).
  • Add an Eq instance for ParseError
  • Fixed a regression from 3.1.6: runP is again exported from module Text.Parsec.

3.1.8

  • Fix a regression from 3.1.6 related to exports from the main module.

3.1.7

  • Fix a regression from 3.1.6 related to the reported position of error messages. See bug #9 for details.
  • Reset the current error position on success of lookAhead.

3.1.6

  • Export Text instances from Text.Parsec
  • Make Text.Parsec exports more visible
  • Re-arrange Text.Parsec exports
  • Add functions crlf and endOfLine to Text.Parsec.Char for handling input streams that do not have normalized line terminators.
  • Fix off-by-one error in Token.charControl

3.1.4

  • Relax dependency on text

3.1.5

  • Relax dependency on text

3.1.3

  • Fix a regression introduced in 3.1.2 related to positions reported by error messages.