Documentation

The abstract data type Doc represents pretty documents.

More specifically, a value of type Doc represents a non-empty set of possible renderings of a document. The rendering functions select one of these possibilities.

Doc is an instance of the Show class. (show doc) pretty prints document doc with a page width of 80 characters and a ribbon width of 32 characters.

show (text "hello" <$> text "world")

Which would return the string "hello\nworld", i.e.

hello
world

Displays a document with the dull red forecolor

Displays a document with the dull green forecolor

The document (x <+> y) concatenates document x and y with a space in between. (infixr 6)

The document (vcat xs) concatenates all documents xs vertically with (<$$>). If a group undoes the line breaks inserted by vcat, all documents are directly concatenated.

The document (fill i x) renders document x. It than appends spaces until the width is equal to i. If the width of x is already larger, nothing is appended. This combinator is quite useful in practice to output a list of bindings. The following example demonstrates this.

types  = [("empty","Doc")
         ,("nest","Int -> Doc -> Doc")
         ,("linebreak","Doc")]

ptype (name,tp)
       = fill 6 (text name) <+> text "::" <+> text tp

test   = text "let" <+> align (vcat (map ptype types))

Which is layed out as:

let empty  :: Doc
    nest   :: Int -> Doc -> Doc
    linebreak :: Doc

The document (indent i x) indents document x with i spaces.

test  = indent 4 (fillSep (map text
        (words "the indent combinator indents these words !")))

Which lays out with a page width of 20 as:

    the indent
    combinator
    indents these
    words !

The document (text s) contains the literal string s. The string shouldn't contain any newline ('n') characters. If the string contains newline characters, the function string should be used.

The action (putDoc doc) pretty prints document doc to the standard output, with a page width of 80 characters and a ribbon width of 32 characters.

main :: IO ()
main = do{ putDoc (text "hello" <+> text "world") }

Which would output

hello world

Any ANSI colorisation in doc will be output.