| Portability | portable |
|---|---|
| Stability | provisional |
| Maintainer | libraries@haskell.org |
| Safe Haskell | Safe-Infered |
Network
Contents
Description
The Network interface is a "higher-level" interface to networking facilities, and it is recommended unless you need the lower-level interface in Network.Socket.
- data Socket
- data PortID
- type HostName = String
- data PortNumber
- withSocketsDo :: IO a -> IO a
- listenOn :: PortID -> IO Socket
- accept :: Socket -> IO (Handle, HostName, PortNumber)
- sClose :: Socket -> IO ()
- connectTo :: HostName -> PortID -> IO Handle
- sendTo :: HostName -> PortID -> String -> IO ()
- recvFrom :: HostName -> PortID -> IO String
- socketPort :: Socket -> IO PortID
Basic data types
Constructors
| Service String | |
| PortNumber PortNumber | |
| UnixSocket String |
Either a host name e.g., "haskell.org" or a numeric host
address string consisting of a dotted decimal IPv4 address or an
IPv6 address e.g., "192.168.0.1".
data PortNumber Source
Initialisation
withSocketsDo :: IO a -> IO aSource
On Windows operating systems, the networking subsystem has to be
initialised using withSocketsDo before any networking operations can
be used. eg.
main = withSocketsDo $ do {...}
Although this is only strictly necessary on Windows platforms, it is harmless on other platforms, so for portability it is good practice to use it all the time.
Server-side connections
Creates the server side socket which has been bound to the specified port.
NOTE: To avoid the "Address already in use"
problems popped up several times on the GHC-Users mailing list we
set the ReuseAddr socket option on the listening socket. If you
don't want this behaviour, please use the lower level
listen instead.
If available, the IPv6Only socket option is set to 0
so that both IPv4 and IPv6 can be accepted with this socket.
Arguments
| :: Socket | Listening Socket |
| -> IO (Handle, HostName, PortNumber) | Triple of: read/write |
Accept a connection on a socket created by listenOn. Normal
I/O operations (see System.IO) can be used on the Handle
returned to communicate with the client.
Notice that although you can pass any Socket to Network.accept,
only sockets of either AF_UNIX, AF_INET, or AF_INET6 will work
(this shouldn't be a problem, though). When using AF_UNIX, HostName
will be set to the path of the socket and PortNumber to -1.
sClose :: Socket -> IO ()Source
Close the socket. All future operations on the socket object will fail. The remote end will receive no more data (after queued data is flushed).
Client-side connections
Simple sending and receiving
Send and receive data from/to the given host and port number. These
should normally only be used where the socket will not be required for
further calls. Also, note that due to the use of hGetContents in recvFrom
the socket will remain open (i.e. not available) even if the function already
returned. Their use is strongly discouraged except for small test-applications
or invocations from the command line.
Miscellaneous
Networking Issues
Buffering
The Handle returned by connectTo and accept is block-buffered by
default. For an interactive application you may want to set the
buffering mode on the Handle to
LineBuffering or NoBuffering, like so:
h <- connectTo host port hSetBuffering h LineBuffering
Improving I/O Performance over sockets
For really fast I/O, it might be worth looking at the hGetBuf and
hPutBuf family of functions in System.IO.
SIGPIPE
On Unix, when writing to a socket and the reading end is
closed by the remote client, the program is normally sent a
SIGPIPE signal by the operating system. The
default behaviour when a SIGPIPE is received is
to terminate the program silently, which can be somewhat confusing
if you haven't encountered this before. The solution is to
specify that SIGPIPE is to be ignored, using
the POSIX library:
import Posix main = do installHandler sigPIPE Ignore Nothing; ...