the parser doesn't understand Haskell characters like 'a'

[neongreen]

Text.Pretty.Simple> pStringNoColor "[']']"
"[ ' ]'"

The correct output should be "[']'".

[cdepillabout]

@neongreen I think the problem with pretty-simple is two-fold:

1. pretty-simple doesn't handle non-balanced brackets: allow non-balanced brackets, parens, etc #27. Here's the expression that "[']']" is parsed into:

   [ Brackets 
       ( CommaSeparated 
           { unCommaSeparated = 
               [ [ Other "'" ] ]
           }
       )
   , Other "'" 
   ]

   Basically this means there are brackets surrounding a ', and then a single '. The final bracket is removed. The reason there are spaces around the first quote is that pretty-simple prints spaces inside of brackets by default.

   This should instead be parsed into something like this:

   [ Brackets 
       ( CommaSeparated 
           { unCommaSeparated = 
               [ [ CharLit ']' ] ]
           }
       )
   ]

2. pretty-simple doesn't have a special parser for Haskell characters (e.g. things like 'a' or 'X' or ']'). So it doesn't realize that ']' is supposed to be a character (and not a closing bracket).

   It would be nice to add an expression for characters (like the CharLit I've used above).

---

If you want to send a PR fixing either of these things, it would definitely be accepted!

If you wanted to fix this, you'd mainly have to edit the expression parser, which lives in these two files:

https://github.com/cdepillabout/pretty-simple/blob/787cec7d170077f21407d5b7f65b6694b5b318d3/src/Text/Pretty/Simple/Internal/Expr.hs

https://github.com/cdepillabout/pretty-simple/blob/787cec7d170077f21407d5b7f65b6694b5b318d3/src/Text/Pretty/Simple/Internal/ExprParser.hs

[sjakobi]

Text.Pretty.Simple> pStringNoColor "[']']"
"[ ' ]'"

The correct output should be "[']'".

Should that be "[ ']' ]" in analogy to

> pStringNoColor "[1]"
"[ 1 ]"

?