As you said, you're probably looking for lenses. A lens is a value that allows to read, set or modify a given field. Usually with Control.Lens
, you define fields with underscores and you use makeLenses
to create full-featured lenses.
There are many combinators that allow lenses to be used together within MonadState
. In your case we can use %=
, which in this case would be specialized to type
(MonadState s m) => Lens' s b -> (b -> b) -> m ()
which modifies a state value using a given lens and a function that operates on the inside value.
Your example could be rewritten using lenses as follows:
{-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell, RankNTypes #-}
import Control.Lens
import Control.Monad.State
data Test = Test { _first :: Int
, _second :: String
}
deriving Show
-- Generate `first` and `second` lenses.
$(makeLenses ''Test)
-- | An example of a universal function that modifies any lens.
-- It reads a string and appends it to the existing value.
modif :: Lens' a String -> StateT a IO ()
modif l = do
r <- lift getLine
l %= (++ r)
dataTest :: Test
dataTest = Test { _first = 1, _second = "" }
test :: IO Test
test = execStateT (modif second) dataTest