Which Haskell XML library to use?

Question

I see that there is a few of XML processing libraries in Haskell.

• HaXml seems to be the most popular (according to dons)
• HXT seems to be the most advanced (but also the most difficult to learn thanks to arrows)
• xml which seems to be just the basic parser
• HXML seems to be abandoned
• tagsoup and tagchup
• libXML and libXML SAX bindings

So, which library to choose if I want it

• to be reasonably powerful (to extract data from XML and to modify XML)
• likely to be supported long time in the future
• to be a “community choice” (default choice)

And while most of the above seem to be sufficient for my current needs, what are the reason to choose one of them over the others?

UPD 20091222:

Some notes about licenses:

• BSD or MIT: hexpat, hxt, libxml, tagsoup, xml
• LGPL: HaXml
• GPLv2:
• GPLv3: libxml-sax, tagchup, tagsoup-ht

Answer 1

I would personally recommend HXT because it uses arrows, which are a very useful and powerful tool to learn, and an XML parsing library is the perfect use for arrows (they were first invented to solve various parsing problems that monads couldn't). Arrows are also starting to be used outside of pure functional programming, such as Arrowlets in JavaScript.

Answer 2

I would recommend:

1. xml, if your task is simple
2. haxml, if your task is complex
3. hxt, if you like arrows
4. hexpat if you need high performance

Answer 3

Arrows are friendly.