Applicative Parsing I: Building the Foundation

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<a href="https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2018/2/5/parsing-primer-gherkin-syntax" target="_blank">Last week</a> we prepared ourselves for parsing by going over the basics of the Gherkin Syntax. In this article and the next, we’ll be using the <a href="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/regex-applicative-0.3.3/docs/Text-Regex-Applicative.html#t:RE" target="_blank">applicative parsing</a> library to parse that syntax. This week, we’ll focus on the fundamentals of this library, and build up a vocabulary of combinators to use. We’ll make heavy use of the <code class="markup--code markup--p-code">Applicative</code> typeclass. If you need a refresher on that, check out <a href="https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2017/2/6/applicatives-one-step-further" target="_blank">this article</a>. As we start coding, you can also follow along with the examples on <a href="https://github.com/jhb563/GherkinParsing" target="_blank">Github here</a>! Most of the code here is in <a href="https://github.com/jhb563/GherkinParsing/blob/master/src/Parser.hs" target="_blank">Parser.hs</a>.