I recently began working on a new venture, QR Card Us to help support my education and fund another venture–it just launched tonight. This isn’t so much a sales pitch about that though as it is an announcement of an open-sourced Haskell module I wrote in the process (though, you’re certainly welcome to go check it out, tell your friends, and order some!).

As I was reading up on vCards, I found it most helpful to read RFC 2426. I wanted to easily play around with vCards in my favorite language, but didn’t care for the existing vCard module, so I decided to write my own instead, thus letting me announce hs-vcard. I think it’s fairly straight forward and well-documented, so I’ll end with an example input and the output.

This is the vCard for Frank Dawson, one of the RFC 2426 authors, constructed in Haskell:

1import Text.VCard
2
3vc = VCard  "Frank Dawson"
4            (IndividualNames ["Dawson"] ["Frank"] [] [] [])
5            [ Organization ["Lotus Development Corporation"]
6            , Address [AddrWork, AddrPostal, AddrParcel] "" ""
7                        "6544 Battleford Drive"
8                        "Raleigh" "NC" "27613-3502" "U.S.A"
9            , Telephone [TelVoice, TelMessage, TelWork] "+1-919-676-9515"
10            , Telephone [TelFax, TelWork] "+1-919-676-9564"
11            , Email [EmailInternet, EmailPreferred] "Frank_Dawson@Lotus.com"
12            , Email [EmailInternet] "fdawson@earthlink.net"
13            , URL "http://home.earthlink.net/~fdawson"
14            ]

and printed out as:

BEGIN:vCard
VERSION:3.0
FN:Frank Dawson
N:Dawson;Frank;;;
ORG:Lotus Development Corporation
ADR;TYPE=WORK,POSTAL,PARCEL:;;6544 Battleford Drive;Raleigh;NC;27613-3502;U.S.A
TEL;TYPE=VOICE,MSG,WORK:+1-919-676-9515
TEL;TYPE=FAX,WORK:+1-919-676-9564
EMAIL;TYPE=INTERNET,PREF:Frank_Dawson@Lotus.com
EMAIL;TYPE=INTERNET:fdawson@earthlink.net
URL:http://home.earthlink.net/~fdawson
END:vCard

Please let me know if you find any problems, and even better: fix them and submit patches to the GitHub repository. I also chose to not implement reading them in, primarily because I had absolutely no use for that, but people are again welcome to contribute and do so.

I hope you find it useful! Please feel free to comment with any questions or feedback you might have on how I could do things better.