NAME
DtdToHaskell - a XML DTD to Haskell translator
SYNOPSIS
DtdToHaskell [ dtdfile [ outfile ]]
Missing file arguments or dashes (-) indicate standard input or output
respectively.
DESCRIPTION
DtdToHaskell is a tool for translating any valid XML DTD into
equivalent Haskell types. This allows you to generate, edit, and
transform documents as normal typed values in programs, and to read and
write them as human-readable XML documents. It uses the
Text.XML.HaXml.XmlContent class as a framework for printing and
parsing.
DtdToHaskell reads and parses a DTD from dtdfile (which may be either
just a DTD, or a full XML document containing an internal DTD). It
generates into outfile a Haskell module containing a collection of type
definitions plus some class instance declarations for I/O.
In order to use the resulting module, you need to import it, and also
to import Text.XML.HaXml.XmlContent. To read and write XML files as
values of the declared types, use some of the convenience functions
from XmlContent.
You will need to study the automatically-generated type declarations to
write your own code using them - but most things have pretty obvious
parallels to the DTD structure.
LIMITATIONS
The generated Haskell contains references to types like OneOf3 where
there is a choice between n (in this case 3) different tags.
Currently, the module Text.XML.HaXml.OneOfN defines these types up to
n=20. If your DTD requires larger choices, then use the tool MkOneOf
to generate the extra size or range of sizes you need.
We mangle tag names and attribute names to ensure that they have the
correct lexical form in Haskell, but this means that (for instance) we
can’t distinguish Myname and myname, which are different names in XML
but translate to overlapping types in Haskell (and hence probably won’t
compile).
Attribute names translate into named fields: but because Haskell
doesn’t allow different types to have the same named field, this means
your XML document which uses the same name for similar attributes on
different tags would crash and burn. We have fixed this by
incorporating the tagname into the named field in addition to the
attribute name, e.g. tagAttr instead of just attr. Uglier, but more
portable.
XML namespaces. Currently, we just mangle the namespace identifier
into any tag name which uses it. Probably the right way to do it is to
regard the namespace as a separate imported module, and hence translate
the namespace prefix into a module qualifier. Does this sound about
right? (It isn’t implemented yet.)
External subset. Since HaXml release 1.00, we support the XML DTD
external subset. This means we can read and parse a whole bunch of
files as part of the same DTD, and we respect INCLUDE and IGNORE
conditional sections. The sub-DTD files must be available locally - we
don’t go looking for them on the web.
There are some fringe parts of the DTD we are not entirely sure about,
such as Tokenised Types and Notation Types. In particular, there is no
validity checking of these external references. If you find a problem,
mail us:
Malcolm.Wallace@cs.york.ac.uk
COPYRIGHT
The HaXml library and tools were written by and are copyright to
Copyright © 1998 – 2006 Malcolm Wallace and Colin Runciman
The library incorporates the module
Text.ParserCombinators.HuttonMeijerWallace
Copyright © 1996 Graham Hutton and Erik Meijer
with modifications
Copyright © 1998 – 2000 Malcolm Wallace
and may also use or incorporate the module Text.PrettyPrint.HughesPJ
Copyright © 1996 – 1997 John Hughes and Simon Peyton Jones
The HaXml library is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General
Public Licence (LGPL), with the following special exception:
As a relaxation of clause 6 of the LGPL, the copyright holders
of this library give permission to use, copy, link, modify, and
distribute, binary-only object-code versions of an executable
linked with the Library, without requiring the supply of any
mechanism to modify or replace the Library and relink (clauses
6a, 6b, 6c, 6d, 6e), provided that all the other terms of clause
6 are complied with.
The HaXml tools Xtract, Validate, DtdToHaskell, and MkOneOf, are
licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).
This library and toolset is distributed in the hope that it will be
useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
Licences for more details.
SEE ALSO
MkOneOf(1), Validate(1)
AUTHOR
This contents of this manual page was copied from the HTML
documentation and slightly edited by Arjan Oosting <arjan@debian.org>
for the Debian system (but may be used by others).