This will be easy to implement with servant. It's also very efficient,
and fairly future-proof. Eg, could add another frame with other data.
This does make it a bit harder to use this protocol, but netstrings
probably take about 5 minutes to implement? Let's see...
import Text.Read
import Data.List
toNetString :: String -> String
toNetString s = show (length s) ++ ":" ++ s ++ ","
nextNetString :: String -> Maybe (String, String)
nextNetString s = case break (== ':') s of
([], _) -> Nothing
(sn, rest) -> do
n <- readMaybe sn
let (v, rest') = splitAt n (drop 1 rest)
return (v, drop 1 rest')
Ok, well, that took about 10 minutes ;-)