Text.XML.HaXml.Verbatim

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Text.XML.HaXml.Verbatim |
Portability | portable
Stability | experimental
Maintainer | simons@cryp.to
Description
The preferred method for rendering a `Document` or single `Content` is by using the pretty printing facility defined in Pretty. Pretty-printing does not work well for cases, however, where the formatting in the XML document is significant. Examples of this case are XHTML's `<pre>` tag, Docbook's `<literallayout>` tag, and many more. Theoretically, the document author could avoid this problem by wrapping the contents of these tags in a <![CDATA[...]]> section, but often this is not practical, for instance when the literal-layout section contains other elements. Finally, program writers could manually format these elements by transforming them into a literal string in their CFliter, etc., but this is annoying to do and prone to omissions and formatting errors. As an alternative, this module provides the function `verbatim`, which will format XML `Content` as a String while retaining the formatting of the input document unchanged. Know problems: HaXml's parser eats line feeds between two tags. `Attribute`s should be formatted by making them an instance of `Verbatim` as well, but since an `Attribute` is just a tuple, not a full data type, the helper function `verbAttr` must be used instead. `CMisc` is not yet supported. `Element`s, which contain no content, are formatted as `<element-name/>`, even if they were not defined as being of type `EMPTY`. In XML this perfectly alright, but in SGML it is not. Those, who wish to use `verbatim` to format parts of say an HTML page will have to (a) replace problematic elements by literals before running `verbatim` or (b) use a second search-and-replace stage to fix this.
Synopsis
class Verbatim a where
verbatim :: a -> String
verbAttr :: Attribute -> String
Documentation
class Verbatim a where
This class promises that the function `verbatim` knows how to format this data type into a string without changing the formatting.
Methods
verbatim :: a -> String
Instances
(Verbatim a) => Verbatim [a]
Verbatim Char
(Verbatim a, Verbatim b) => Verbatim (Either a b)
Verbatim Content
Verbatim Element
Verbatim Reference
verbAttr :: Attribute -> String
This is a helper function is required because Haskell does not allow to make an ordinary tuple (like `Attribute`) an instance of a class. The resulting output will preface the actual attribute with a single blank so that lists of `Attribute`s can be handled implicitly by the definition for lists of `Verbatim` data types.
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