Regex & String Libraries in Haskell

Question

I\'m trying to introduce Haskell into my daily life by using it to write incidental scripts and such.

readProcess is handy for getting the results of exterior commands,

Answer 1

There are plenty of great regex libs in Haskell, but we have better tools. Let's stick with standard Haskell Strings for now (i.e. lists of Char). The basics are all in Data.List -- http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base-4.3.0.0/Data-List.html. You have lines, unlines, words, unwords, takewhile, dropwhile, etc.etc. Also isPrefixOf and isInfixOf, etc.

You may end up writing your own recursive functions fairly directly, but that's a breeze too. The only really missing operations are splitting ones, for which you can use brent's excellent package: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/split

Fundamentally, the notion is that you want to do incremental processing of streams of characters.

Not everything is as efficient as possible, especially since the string representation is not that efficient. But if/when you move on to other data types, the core concepts of how you process things will translate directly from basic strings.