HTML is all very well and good, but frankly, I'm too lazy to mark up my
&,<,> characters all the time by hand, at least within
code.  I used the POD formatter pod2html for a couple of early
posts.  It's OK, it basically has a concept of "This is a normal text
paragraph, and this is a code paragraph" but for those times that I
want to do anything clever, it's just that little bit more clunky than
markup in HTML.


When I asked what people use on IRC, people suggested HsColour.  OK,
that wasn't really the question - I was more about laziness and
practicality than shiny features - but, fair enough, highlighted haskell
code would be nice too.


I had a stupid little formatter I use for fiction writing, which does
basic paragraph formatting and word count, while making a horrible hack
of not screwing up HTML markup (because it, er, "grew organically", and
I didn't get around to using an HTML parser as I would have done if I
were sane).


So I hacked on the Perl (yeah, not haskell, this is a blog on learning
haskell, if I already knew how to write the formatter in it...) doing
the following



  • Bringing it into my ‘modulino’ framework (which handles things like
    command line options, documentation, logging etc.)
  • reworking the parsing to be more modular so you can subclass it
    easily
  • using HTML::Parser instead of just hacking at it with
    regexps.  (The smartquote stuff is still regexps of course)
  • adding a rule for indented paragraphs, and haskell paras (indented
    with the first nonwhitespace character being ">".   This uses
    HsColour -partial -html