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snoyberg / http-enumerator

HTTP client package with enumerator interface and HTTPS support.
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http-enumerator examples don't work on Windows (need to be wrapped in withSocketsDo) #1

Closed Olathe closed 14 years ago

Olathe commented 14 years ago

The initial examples (downloading www.haskell.org with simpleHttp and saving google.com to a file) don't work on Windows because they're missing withSocketsDo.

It was very hard for me to figure out what was going on because the error message made it seem like the hostname couldn't be resolved. Could you please correct the documentation?

edit: Found out that withSocketsDo is the responsibility of the library user rather than the library

snoyberg commented 14 years ago

While it's true that you need to use withSocketsDo, this needs to be an application-wide action, not performed by this library. This is documented along with withHttpEnumerator: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/http-enumerator/0.2.0.2/doc/html/Network-HTTP-Enumerator.html#v:withHttpEnumerator

It's just one of those unfortunate annoyances of Windows programming.

Olathe commented 14 years ago

It is mentioned there for sure, but I'm referring more to the two examples at the top of the documentation, which are full but admittedly-short applications.

If a Windows programmer was trying out this package and went to the docs and saw these two examples, they'd try them out verbatim and get a very unhelpful error message that they might not be able to or have the motivation to figure out, which could tarnish their impression of http-enumerator.

Wrapping those two example apps with withSocketsDo would solve this problem and get new people into the habit of using an application-wide withSocketsDo all in one step.

Perhaps -- Just download an HTML document and print it. import Network.HTTP.Enumerator import Network.Socket import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy as L

main = withSocketsDo putHaskellWebsite
putHaskellWebsite = simpleHttp "http://www.haskell.org/" >>= L.putStr
snoyberg commented 14 years ago

Good idea. I'm uploading a new version of the package with a better explanation of this.