It is quite hard to formulate good questions titles as a newbie. Please make this question search friendly =)
Trying to write my first "real" Haskell program (i.e. not only Project Euler stuff), I am trying to read and parse my configuration file with nice error messages. So far, I have this:
import Prelude hiding (readFile)
import System.FilePath (FilePath)
import System.Directory (doesFileExist)
import Data.Aeson
import Control.Monad.Except
import Data.ByteString.Lazy (ByteString, readFile)
-- Type definitions without real educational value here
loadConfiguration :: FilePath -> ExceptT String IO Configuration
loadConfiguration path = do
fileContent <- readConfigurationFile "C:\\Temp\\config.json"
configuration <- parseConfiguration fileContent
return configuration
readConfigurationFile :: FilePath -> ExceptT String IO ByteString
readConfigurationFile path = do
fileExists <- liftIO $ doesFileExist path
if fileExists then do
fileContent <- liftIO $ readFile path
return fileContent
else
throwError $ "Configuration file not found at " ++ path ++ "."
parseConfiguration :: ByteString -> ExceptT String IO Configuration
parseConfiguration raw = do
let result = eitherDecode raw :: Either String Configuration
case result of
Left message -> throwError $ "Error parsing configuration file: " ++ message
Right configuration -> return configuration
This works, but the IO monad in parseConfiguration is not necessary, and should go away. But I can't just drop it, of course, and I have not yet found a way to change parseConfiguration to something pure while keeping the prettyness of loadConfiguration.
What is the correct way to write this? If this is answered in the documentation, I am sorry, but I did not find it. I think reading the hackage documentation is a skill that grows as slowly as the rest of my Haskell skills. =)
P.S.: Comments on other style mistakes are, of course, very welcome!
If you are already using mtl, then the solution given by bheklilr in his comment is a good one. Make parseConfiguration work on any monad that implements MonadError.
If for whatever reason you are not using mtl, but only transformers, then you need'll a function with a type like Monad n => Except e a -> ExceptT e n a that "hoists" an Except into an ExceptT over some monad.
We can build this function using mapExceptT :: (m (Either e a) -> n (Either e' b)) -> ExceptT e m a -> ExceptT e' n b, a function that can change the base monad of an ExceptT transformer.
Except is really ExceptT Identity, so what we want is to unwrap the Identity and return the value in the new monad:
hoistExcept :: Monad n => Except e a -> ExceptT e n a
hoistExcept = mapExceptT (return . runIdentity)
You could also define it this way:
hoistExcept :: Monad n => Except e a -> ExceptT e n a
hoistExcept = ExceptT . return . runIdentity . runExceptT
Related
Say I have a monadic stack like this:
import Control.Monad.Trans.Reader
import Control.Monad.Trans.Except
import Control.Monad.Trans
type MyMonad = ReaderT Env (ExceptT String IO) -- Env is irrelevant
And a function (simplified, but the idea holds):
f :: Integer -> MyMonad Integer
f 42 = lift $ throwE "42 is an ILLEGAL number"
f n = return n
What I now want to do is call f from another function, but catch the thrown exception if it occurs and somehow handle it (for instance, throw another exception but with the message changed). I'm having a hard time figuring out what kind of lift operations should be done here for it to be done properly. I tried something like this:
g n = do
x <- (f n) `catchE'` (\_ -> lift $ throwE "nope, still illegal")
return x
where catchE' - lift . catchE
but it obviously won't work because catchE' takes something in the ExceptT monad, not MyMonad. Can it be done easily? Perhaps changing the structure of the monad stack could help?
You need more than lift to lift catch through a monad transformer. In fact, there are transformers with no way to lift catch at all (such as ContT). However for ReaderT there is, and the easiest way to make use of that is via Control.Monad.Error.catchError from the mtl library.
Backstory
I have a number of data files, each of them containing a list of data records (one per line).
Similar to CSV but sufficiently different that I'd prefer to write my own parser rather than using a CSV library.
For the purpose of this question I will use a simplified data file that contains just one number per line:
1
2
3
error
4
As you can see it is possible that a file contains malformed data in which case the whole file should be considered malformed.
The kind of data-processing I want to do can be expressed in terms of maps and folds.
So, I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn how to use the pipes library.
{-# LANGUAGE NoMonomorphismRestriction #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-}
{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-}
import Control.Monad.Except
import Pipes ((>->))
import qualified Pipes as P
import qualified Pipes.Prelude as P
import qualified Pipes.Safe as P
import qualified System.IO as IO
First, I create a producer of lines in the text file.
This is very similar to the example in the docs of Pipes.Safe.
getLines = do
P.bracket (IO.openFile "data.txt" IO.ReadMode) IO.hClose P.fromHandle
Next, I need a function to parse each of these lines.
As I mentioned before, this might fail, which I will represent with Either.
type ErrMsg = String
parseNumber :: String -> Either ErrMsg Integer
parseNumber s = case reads s of
[(n, "")] -> Right n
_ -> Left $ "Parse Error: \"" ++ s ++ "\""
For simplicity, as a first step, I want to collect all data records into a list of records.
The most straight-forward approach is to pipe all the lines through the parser and just collect the whole thing into a list.
readNumbers1 :: IO [Either ErrMsg Integer]
readNumbers1 = P.runSafeT $ P.toListM $
getLines >-> P.map parseNumber
Unfortunately, that creates a list of eithers of records.
However, if the file contains one wrong record then the whole file should be considered wrong.
What I really want is an either of a list of records.
Of course I can just use sequence to transpose the list of eithers.
readNumbers2 :: IO (Either ErrMsg [Integer])
readNumbers2 = sequence <$> readNumbers1
But, that would read the whole file even if the first line is already malformed.
These files can be large and I have many of them, so, it would be better if the reading would stop at the first error.
Question
My Question is how to achieve that.
How to abort parsing upon the first malformed record?
What I got so far
My first thought was to use the monad instance of Either ErrMsg and P.mapM instead of P.map.
Since we are reading from a file we already have IO and SafeT in our monad stack, so, I guess I'll need ExceptT to get error handling into that monad stack.
This is the point where I'm stuck.
I tried many different combinations and always ended up being yelled at by the type-checker.
The following is the closest I can get to it compiles.
readNumbers3 = P.runSafeT $ runExceptT $ P.toListM $
getLines >-> P.mapM (ExceptT . return . parseNumber)
The infered type of readNumbers3 reads
*Main> :t readNumbers3
readNumbers3
:: (MonadIO m, P.MonadSafe (ExceptT ErrMsg (P.SafeT m)),
P.MonadMask m, P.Base (ExceptT ErrMsg (P.SafeT m)) ~ IO) =>
m (Either ErrMsg [Integer])
which looks close to what I want:
readNumbers3 :: IO (Either ErrMsg [Integer])
However, as soon as I try to actually execute that action I get the following error message in ghci:
*Main> readNumbers3
<interactive>:7:1:
Couldn't match expected type ‘IO’
with actual type ‘P.Base (ExceptT ErrMsg (P.SafeT m0))’
The type variable ‘m0’ is ambiguous
In the first argument of ‘print’, namely ‘it’
In a stmt of an interactive GHCi command: print it
If I try to apply the following type-signature:
readNumbers3 :: IO (Either ErrMsg [Integer])
Then I get the following error message:
error.hs:108:5:
Couldn't match expected type ‘IO’
with actual type ‘P.Base (ExceptT ErrMsg (P.SafeT IO))’
In the first argument of ‘(>->)’, namely ‘getLines’
In the second argument of ‘($)’, namely
‘getLines >-> P.mapM (ExceptT . return . parseNumber)’
In the second argument of ‘($)’, namely
‘P.toListM $ getLines >-> P.mapM (ExceptT . return . parseNumber)’
Failed, modules loaded: none.
Aside
Another motivation for moving the error handling into the pipe's base monad is that it would make further data processing much easier if I wouldn't have to juggle with eithers in my maps and folds.
Here is an incremental approach to solving the problem.
Following Tekmo's suggestion in this SO answer
we aim to operate in the following monad:
ExceptT String (Pipe a b m) r
We begin with imports and the definition of parseNumber:
import Control.Monad.Except
import Pipes ((>->))
import qualified Pipes as P
import qualified Pipes.Prelude as P
parseNumber :: String -> Either String Integer
parseNumber s = case reads s of
[(n, "")] -> Right n
_ -> Left $ "Parse Error: \"" ++ s ++ "\""
Here is a plain Producer of Strings in the IO-monad we'll use as our input:
p1 :: P.Producer String IO ()
p1 = P.stdinLn >-> P.takeWhile (/= "quit")
To lift it to the ExceptT monad we just use lift:
p2 :: ExceptT String (P.Producer String IO) ()
p2 = lift p1
Here is a pipeline segment which converts Strings to Integers in the ExceptT monad:
p4 :: ExceptT String (P.Pipe String Integer IO) a
p4 = forever $
do s <- lift P.await
case parseNumber s of
Left e -> throwError e
Right n -> lift $ P.yield n
The probably can be written more combinatorially, but I've left it very explicit for clarity.
Next we join p2 and p4 together. The result is also in the ExceptT monad.
-- join together p2 and p4
p7 :: ExceptT String (P.Producer Integer IO) ()
p7 = ExceptT $ runExceptT p2 >-> runExceptT p4
Tekmo's SO answer suggests creating a new operator for this.
Finally, we can use toListM' to run this pipeline. (I've included the definition of toListM' here because it doesn't appear in my installed version of Pipes.Prelude)
p8 :: IO ([Integer], Either String ())
p8 = toListM' $ runExceptT p7
toListM' :: Monad m => P.Producer a m r -> m ([a], r)
toListM' = P.fold' step begin done
where
step x a = x . (a:)
begin = id
done x = x []
Examples of how p8 works:
ghci> p8
4
5
6
quit
([4,5,6],Right ())
ghci> p8
5
asd
([5],Left "Parse Error: \"asd\"")
Update
You can simplify the code by generalizing parseNumber like this:
parseNumber' :: (MonadError [Char] m) => String -> m Integer
parseNumber' s = case reads s of
[(n, "")] -> return n
_ -> throwError $ "Parse Error: \"" ++ s ++ "\""
Then p4 may be written:
p4' :: ExceptT String (P.Pipe String Integer IO) a
p4' = forever $ lift P.await >>= parseNumber' >>= lift . P.yield
I'm trying to use the "citation-resolve" package in a Haskell project I'm working on, but I'm having trouble getting my head around using EitherT's in real code. I get that they're monad transformers, and I think I understand what that means, however I can't seem to actually work out how to use them. The toy example that represents what I'm trying to do is as follows:
module Main where
import Text.EditDistance
import Text.CSL.Input.Identifier
import Text.CSL.Reference
import Control.Monad.Trans.Class
import Control.Monad.Trans.Either
main = do
putStrLn "Resolving definition"
let resRef = runEitherT $ resolveEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595"
case resRef of
Left e -> do
putStrLn ("Got error: "++ e)
Right ref -> do
putStrLn ("Added reference to database: "++ (show ref))
Here, resolveEither has the type:
resolveEither :: (HasDatabase s,
Control.Monad.IO.Class.MonadIO m,
mtl-2.1.3.1:Control.Monad.State.Class.MonadState s m)
=> String -> EitherT String m Reference
and runEitherT $ resolveEither "ref" has the type:
runEitherT $ resolveEither "ref"
:: (HasDatabase s,
Control.Monad.IO.Class.MonadIO m,
mtl-2.1.3.1:Control.Monad.State.Class.MonadState s m)
=> m (Either String Reference)
However, this gives the following error:
Main.hs:10:34:
No instance for (Control.Monad.IO.Class.MonadIO (Either [Char]))
arising from a use of ‘resolveEither’
In the first argument of ‘runEitherT’, namely
‘(resolveEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595")’
In the expression:
runEitherT (resolveEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595")
In an equation for ‘resRef’:
resRef = runEitherT (resolveEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595")
Which I have no idea how to resolve, or work around.
Any help would be appreciated, especially pointers to tutorials dealing with monad transformers from a usage perspective, not an implementation one.
Edit:
To reflect the comments on answers by dfeuer and Christian, I still get errors if I change main to the following:
main = do
putStrLn "Resolving definition"
resRef <- runEitherT (resolveEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595")
case resRef of
Left e -> do
putStrLn ("Got error: "++ e)
Right ref -> do
putStrLn ("Added reference to database: "++ (show ref))
The error I get now is:
No instance for (MonadState s0 IO)
arising from a use of ‘resolveEither’
In the first argument of ‘runEitherT’, namely
‘(resolveEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595")’
In a stmt of a 'do' block:
resRef <- runEitherT (resolveEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595")
In the expression:
do { putStrLn "Resolving definition";
resRef <- runEitherT (resolveEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595");
case resRef of {
Left e -> do { ... }
Right ref -> do { ... } } }
I'm editing my question as well as commenting, as nice code formatting is substantially easier here than in a comment.
I believe the problem is that you're trying to pattern match on resRef when what you probably want to do is execute it and pattern match on the result.
So you should try this:
main = do
putStrLn "Resolving definition"
resRef <- runEitherT $ resolveEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595"
case resRef of
Left e -> do
You've encountered one of the shortcomings of the mtl class-based approach: intimidating type errors. I think it'll be helpful to imagine what the situation would look like with normal transformers-based monad transformers. I hope this will also help you get your feet with monad transformers in general. (It looks like you already understand most of this, by the way; I'm just spelling it out.)
Giving the types is a great way to start. Here's what you had:
resolveEither :: (HasDatabase s,
MonadIO m,
MonadState s m)
=> String -> EitherT String m Reference
There's a type hidden in the constraints, s, which came back to bite you a little later. The constraints, roughly speaking, express the following: s has a database (whatever that means in context); the monad or monad stack m has IO at its base, and somewhere in the monad stack m is a StateT s layer. The simplest monad stack m satisfying those properties would be HasDatabase s => StateT s IO. So we could write this:
resolveEither' :: HasDatabase s
=> String -> EitherT String (StateT s IO) Reference
resolveEither' = resolveEither
All we've done is specify the type of m so it's no longer a variable. We don't need to do that as long as we satisfy the class constraints.
Now it's clearer that there are two layers of monad transformers. Since our main function is in the IO monad, we want to end up with a value of type IO, which we can "run", for instance using <- in do notation. I think of it as "stripping away" layers of the monad transformer, from out to in. (This is what "using" monad transformers boils down to.)
For EitherT, there's a function runEitherT :: EitherT e m a -> m (Either e a). See how the m moves from "inside" the EitherT to "outside"? For me, that's the critical intuitive observation. Similarly for StateT, there's runStateT :: StateT s m a -> s -> m (a, s).
(Incidentally, both are defined as record accessors, which is idiomatic but causes them to show up a bit oddly in Haddock and with the "wrong" type signature; it took me a while to learn to look in the "Constructor" section on Haddocks and mentally add the EitherT e m a -> etc. to the front of the signature.)
So this adds up to a general solution, which you've basically worked out: we need an appropriate value of type s (which I'll call s), then we can use flip runStateT s . runEitherT $ resolveEither "ref" which has type IO ((Either String Reference), s). (Assuming I've kept the types straight in my head, which I probably didn't. I had forgotten flip the first time.) We can then pattern-match or use fst to get to the Either, which seems to be what you really want.
If you'd like me to explicate the errors GHC was giving you, I'd be glad. Informally, it was saying that you weren't "running" or stripping off all the monad transformers. More precisely, it was observing that IO wasn't something like StateT s IO. By using runStateT and runEitherT, you force or constrain the type such that the class constraints end up satisfied. This is kind of confusing when you get things slightly wrong.
Oh, regarding an idiomatic way to write the solution: I'm not sure that a separate retEither function would be idiomatic here, because it looks like it's meddling with global state, i.e. opening some sort of database file. It depends what the library's idiom is like.
Also, by using evalStateT, you're implicitly throwing away the state after evaluation, which may or may not be a bad idea. Does the library expect you to reuse the database connection?
Finally, you have some extra parentheses and some missing type signatures; hlint will help you with those.
Okay, so I think I've worked out a solution to my original problem, which was getting a value of the type IO (Either String Reference) from the function resolveEither (which it does for the resolveDef function it provides).
So, resolveEither returns a type of
(HasDatabase s, MonadIO m, MonadState s m) => String -> EitherT String m Reference
which we can transform to one of type
(HasDatabase s, MonadIO m, MonadState s m) => String -> m (Either String Reference)
using runEitherT . resolveEither. This was where I'd got up to when I asked the question. From there, i tried looking at the source to see how the library extracted a Reference type from the function resolveEither. The library uses the following function:
resolve :: (MonadIO m, MonadState s m, HasDatabase s) => String -> m Reference
resolve = liftM (either (const emptyReference) id) . runEitherT . resolveEither
however, we want to preserve the either, i.e. removing liftM (either (const emptyReference) id)
This however gets us back to where we started, so I looked at the source again, and worked out how this function is used. In the library, the function is used within the following, which transforms the output type of resolve from a value of type (MonadIO m, MonadState s m, HasDatabase s) => m Reference to one of type IO Reference:
resolveDef :: String -> IO Reference
resolveDef url = do
fn <- getDataFileName "default.db"
let go = withDatabaseFile fn $ resolve url
State.evalStateT go (def :: Database)
We can replace resolve in the previous with runEitherT.resolveEither to get a function that returns a IO (Either String Reference):
retEither s = do
fn <- getDataFileName "default.db"
let go = withDatabaseFile fn $ ( (runEitherT.resolveEither) s)
State.evalStateT go (Database Map.empty)
(I've replaced (def :: Database) with (Database Map.empty) as def is only defined internally in citation-resolve)
The overall solution then becomes:
module Main where
import Text.EditDistance
import Text.CSL.Input.Identifier.Internal
import Text.CSL.Input.Identifier
import Text.CSL.Reference
import Control.Monad.Trans.Either
import Control.Monad.State as State
import qualified Data.Map.Strict as Map
main = do
putStrLn "Resolving definition"
resRef <- retEither "doi:10.1145/2500365.2500595"
case resRef of
Left e -> putStrLn ("Got error: "++ e)
Right ref -> putStrLn ("Added reference to database: "++ (show ref))
retEither s = do
fn <- getDataFileName "default.db"
let go = withDatabaseFile fn $ ((runEitherT.resolveEither) s)
State.evalStateT go (Database Map.empty)
Which solves the original problem!
Any pointers on style, or ways of simplifying the whole process would however be very much appreciated.
I have this very simple function
import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy as B
getJson :: IO B.ByteString
getJson = B.readFile jsonFile
readJFile :: IO (Maybe Response)
readJFile = parsing >>= (\d ->
case d of
Left err -> return Nothing
Right ps -> return (Just ps))
where parsing = fmap eitherDecode getJson :: IO (Either String Response)
where jsonFile is a path to a file on my harddrive (pardon the lack of do-notation, but I found this more clear to work with)
my question is; is there a way for me to ditch the IO part so I can work with the bytestring alone?
I know that you can pattern match on certain monads like Either and Maybe to get their values out, but can you do something similar with IO?
Or voiced differently: is there a way for me to make readJFile return Maybe Response without the IO?
To expand on my comments, here's how you can do it:
getJson :: IO B.ByteString
getJson = B.readFile jsonFile -- as before
readJFile :: B.ByteString -> Maybe Response -- look, no IO
readJFile b = case eitherDecode b of
Left err -> Nothing
Right ps -> Just ps
In the end, you combine everything in one IO action again:
getAndProcess :: IO (Maybe Response)
getAndProcess = do
b <- getJson
return (readJFile b)
You never need to "drag a monad" through any functions, unless they all need to actually do IO. Just lift the entire chain into the monad with fmap (or liftM / liftM2 / ...).
For instance,
f1 :: B.ByteString -> K
f2 :: K -> I
f3 :: K -> J
f4 :: I -> J -> M
and your entire thing is supposed to be like
m :: M
m = let k = "f1 getJson"
in f4 (f2 k) (f3 k)
The you can simply do
m = fmap (\b -> let k = f1 b
in f4 (f2 k) (f3 k) )
getJson
Incidentally, this might look nicer with do notation:
m = do
b <- getJson
return $ let k = f1 b
in f4 (f2 k) (f3 k)
Concerning you edit and the question
is there a way for me to make readJFile return Maybe Response without the IO?
No, that can't possibly work, because readJFile does need to do IO. There's no way escaping from the IO monad then, that's the whole point of it! (Well, there is unsafePerformIO as Ricardo says, but this is definitely not a valid application for it.)
If it's the clunkiness of unpacking Maybe values in the IO monad, and the signatures with parens in them, you may want to looks at the MaybeT transformer.
readJFile' :: MaybeT IO Response
readJFile' = do
b <- liftIO getJson
case eitherDecode b of
Left err -> mzero
Right ps -> return ps
No, there is no safe way to get a value out of the IO monad. Instead you should do the work inside the IO monad by applying functions with fmap or bind (>>=). Also you should use decode instead of eitherDecode when you want your result to be in Maybe.
getJson :: IO B.ByteString
getJson = B.readFile jsonFile
parseResponse :: B.ByteString -> Maybe Response
parseResponse = decode
readJFile :: IO (Maybe Response)
readJFile = fmap parseResponse getJSON
You could also use do notation if that is clearer to you:
readJFile :: IO (Maybe Response)
readJFile = do
bytestring <- getJson
return $ decode bytestring
Note that you dont even need the parseResponse function since readJFile specifies the type.
In general, yes, there is a way. Accompanied by a lot of "but", but there is. You're asking for what it's called an unsafe IO operation: System.IO.Unsafe. It's used to write wrappers when calling to external libraries usually, it's not something to resort to in regular Haskell code.
Basically, you can call unsafePerformIO :: IO a -> a which does exactly what you want, it strips out the IO part and gives you back wrapped value of type a. But, if you look at the documentation, there are a number of requirements which you should guarantee yourself to the system, which all end up in the same idea: even though you performed the operation via IO, the answer should be the result of a function, as expected from any other haskell function which does not operate in IO: it should always have the same result without side effects, only based on the input values.
Here, given your code, this is obviously NOT the case, since you're reading from a file. You should just continue working within the IO monad, by calling your readJFile from within another function with result type IO something. Then, you'll be able to read the value within the IO wrapper (being in IO yourself), work on it, and then re-wrap the result in another IO when returning.
I am building a Haskell application and trying to figure out how I am going to build the error handling mechanism. In the real application, I'm doing a bunch of work with Mongo. But, for this, I'm going to simplify by working with basic IO operations on a file.
So, for this test application, I want to read in a file and verify that it contains a proper fibonnacci sequence, with each value separated by a space:
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21
Now, when reading the file, any number of things could actually be wrong, and I am going to call all of those exceptions in the Haskell usage of the word.
data FibException = FileUnreadable IOError
| FormatError String String
| InvalidValue Integer
| Unknown String
instance Error FibException where
noMsg = Unknown "No error message"
strMsg = Unknown
Writing a pure function that verifies the sequence and throws an error in the case that the sequence is invalid is easy (though I could probably do better):
verifySequence :: String -> (Integer, Integer) -> Either FibException ()
verifySequence "" (prev1, prev2) = return ()
verifySequence s (prev1, prev2) =
let readInt = reads :: ReadS Integer
res = readInt s in
case res of
[] -> throwError $ FormatError s
(val, rest):[] -> case (prev1, prev2, val) of
(0, 0, 1) -> verifySequence rest (0, 1)
(p1, p2, val') -> (if p1 + p2 /= val'
then throwError $ InvalidValue val'
else verifySequence rest (p2, val))
_ -> throwError $ InvalidValue val
After that, I want the function that reads the file and verifies the sequence:
type FibIOMonad = ErrorT FibException IO
verifyFibFile :: FilePath -> FibIOMonad ()
verifyFibFile path = do
sequenceStr <- liftIO $ readFile path
case (verifySequence sequenceStr (0, 0)) of
Right res -> return res
Left err -> throwError err
This function does exactly what I want if the file is in the invalid format (it returns Left (FormatError "something")) or if the file has a number out of sequence (Left (InvalidValue 15)). But it throws an error if the file specified does not exist.
How do I catch the IO errors that readFile may produce so that I can transform them into the FileUnreadable error?
As a side question, is this even the best way to do it? I see the advantage that the caller of verifyFibFile does not have to set up two different exception handling mechanisms and can instead catch just one exception type.
You might consider EitherT and the errors package in general. http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/errors/1.3.1/doc/html/Control-Error-Util.html has a utility tryIO for catching IOError in EitherT and you could use fmapLT to map error values to your custom type.
Specifically:
type FibIOMonad = EitherT FibException IO
verifyFibFile :: FilePath -> FibIOMonad ()
verifyFibFile path = do
sequenceStr <- fmapLT FileUnreadable (tryIO $ readFile path)
hoistEither $ verifySequence sequenceStr (0, 0)
#Savanni D'Gerinel: you are on the right track. Let's extract your error-catching code from verifyFibFile to make it more generic, and modify it slightly so that it works directly in ErrorT:
catchError' :: ErrorT e IO a -> (IOError -> ErrorT e IO a) -> ErrorT e IO a
catchError' m f =
ErrorT $ catchError (runErrorT m) (fmap runErrorT f)
verifyFibFile can now be written as:
verifyFibFile' :: FilePath -> FibIOMonad ()
verifyFibFile' path = do
sequenceStr <- catchError' (liftIO $ readFile path) (throwError . FileUnReadable)
ErrorT . return $ verifySequence sequenceStr' (0, 0)
Notice what we have done in catchError'. We have stripped the ErrorT constructor from the ErrorT e IO a action, and also from the return value of the error-handling function, knowing than we can reconstruct them afterwards by wrapping the result of the control operation in ErrorT again.
Turns out that this is a common pattern, and it can be done with monad transformers other than ErrorT. It can get tricky though (how to do this with ReaderT for example?). Luckily, the monad-control packgage already provides this functionality for many common transformers.
The type signatures in monad-control can seem scary at first. Start by looking at just one function: control. It has the type:
control :: MonadBaseControl b m => (RunInBase m b -> b (StM m a)) -> m a
Let's make it more specific by making b be IO:
control :: MonadBaseControl IO m => (RunInBase m IO -> IO (StM m a)) -> m a
m is a monad stack built on top of IO. In your case, it would be ErrorT IO.
RunInBase m IO is a type alias for a magical function, that takes a value of type m a and returns a value of type IO *something*, something being some complex magic that encodes the state of the whole monad stack inside IO and lets you reconstruct the m a value afterwards, once you have "fooled" the control operation that only accepts IO values. control provides you with that function, and also handles the reconstruction for you.
Applying this to your problem, we rewrite verifyFibFile once more as:
import Control.Monad.Trans.Control (control)
import Control.Exception (catch)
verifyFibFile'' :: FilePath -> FibIOMonad ()
verifyFibFile'' path = do
sequenceStr <- control $ \run -> catch (run . liftIO $ readFile path)
(run . throwError . FileUnreadable)
ErrorT . return $ verifySequence sequenceStr' (0, 0)
Keep in mind that this only works when the proper instance of MonadBaseControl b m exists.
Here is a nice introduction to monad-control.
So, here's an answer that I have developed. It centers around getting readFile wrapped into the proper catchError statement, and then lifted.
verifyFibFile :: FilePath -> FibIOMonad ()
verifyFibFile path = do
contents <- liftIO $ catchError (readFile path >>= return . Right) (return . Left . FileUnreadable)
case contents of
Right sequenceStr' -> case (verifySequence sequenceStr' (0, 0)) of
Right res -> return res
Left err -> throwError err
Left err -> throwError err
So, verifyFibFile gets a little more nested in this solution.
readFile path has type IO String, obviously. In this context, the type for catchError will be:
catchError :: IO String -> (IOError -> IO String) -> IO String
So, my strategy was to catch the error and turn it into the left side of an Either, and turn the successful value into the right side, changing my data type to this:
catchError :: IO (Either FibException String) -> (IOError -> IO (Either FibException String)) -> IO (Either FibException String)
I do this by, in the first parameter, simply wrapping the result into Right. I figure that I won't actually execute the return . Right branch of the code unless readFile path was successful. In the other parameter to catch, I start with an IOError, wrap it in Left, and then return it back into the IO context. After that, no matter what the result is, I lift the IO value up into the FibIOMonad context.
I'm bothered by the fact that the code gets even more nested. I have Left values, and all of those Left values get thrown. I'm basically in an Either context, and I had thought that one of the benefits Either's implementation of the Monad class was that Left values would simply be passed along through the binding operations and that no further code in that context would be executed. I would love some elucidation on this, or to see how the nesting can be removed from this function.
Maybe it can't. It does seem that the caller, however, can call verifyFibFile repeatedly and execution basically stops the first time verifyFibFile returns an error. This works:
runTest = do
res <- verifyFibFile "goodfib.txt"
liftIO $ putStrLn "goodfib.txt"
--liftIO $ printResult "goodfib.txt" res
res <- verifyFibFile "invalidValue.txt"
liftIO $ putStrLn "invalidValue.txt"
res <- verifyFibFile "formatError.txt"
liftIO $ putStrLn "formatError.txt"
Main> runErrorT $ runTest
goodfib.txt
Left (InvalidValue 17)
Given the files that I have created, both invalidValue.txt and formatError.txt cause errors, but this function returns Left (InvalidValue ...) for me.
That's okay, but I still feel like I've missed something with my solution. And I have no idea whether I'll be able to translate this into something that makes MongoDB access more robust.