Documentation

This is a template function which makes it possible to branch on a collection of string literals in an efficient way. By using switch, such branching is compiled to a trie of primitive parsing operations, which has optimized control flow, vectorized reads and grouped checking for needed input bytes.

The syntax is slightly magical, it overloads the usual case expression. An example:

    $(switch [| case _ of
        "foo" -> pure True
        "bar" -> pure False |])

The underscore is mandatory in case _ of. Each branch must be a string literal, but optionally we may have a default case, like in

    $(switch [| case _ of
        "foo" -> pure 10
        "bar" -> pure 20
        _     -> pure 30 |])

All case right hand sides must be parsers with the same type. That type is also the type of the whole switch expression.

A switch has longest match semantics, and the order of cases does not matter, except for the default case, which may only appear as the last case.

If a switch does not have a default case, and no case matches the input, then it returns with failure, without having consumed any input. A fallthrough to the default case also does not consume any input.

Switch expression with an optional first argument for performing a post-processing action after every successful branch matching. For example, if we have ws :: ParserT st r e () for a whitespace parser, we might want to consume whitespace after matching on any of the switch cases. For that case, we can define a "lexeme" version of switch as follows.

  switch' :: Q Exp -> Q Exp
  switch' = switchWithPost (Just [| ws |])

Note that this switch' function cannot be used in the same module it's defined in, because of the stage restriction of Template Haskell.

Version of switchWithPost without syntactic sugar. The second argument is the list of cases, the third is the default case.