Marc Weber wrote:

This small patch introduces a now mywords function which recognizes a::b as words a,::,b which is what we need here (?) It does work in the above example.

Here is the diff. Is it worth applying?

154c154 < let wordlines = map words aslines ---

...

let wordlines = map mywords aslines

161a162,174

...

-- my words is mainly copied from Data.List. -- difference abc::def is split into three words instead of one. mywords :: String -> [String] mywords (':':':':xs) = "::" : mywords xs mywords s = case dropWhile {-partain:Char.-}isSpace s of "" -> [] s' -> w : mywords s'' where (w, s'') = myBreak s' myBreak [] = ([],[]) myBreak (':':':':xs) = ([], "::"++xs) myBreak (' ':xs) = ([],xs); myBreak (x:xs) = let (a,b) = myBreak xs in (x:a,b)

Without really knowing in which context this function is going to be used, expected results and so on, I've cooked up another alternative. Naturally it's possible to remove the spaces too if it's really required. let wordlines = map (groupBy (\a b -> isVarChar a == isVarChar b)) aslines isVarChar x = any ($ x) [isDigit, isAlpha, (== '_'), (== '\'')] It parses data LogInController = LogInController {rLoggedIn::R Bool, rwUserName::RWE String, rwPasswd::RWE String} as ["data"," ","LogInController"," = ","LogInController"," {","rLoggedIn","::","R"," ","Bool",", ","rwUserName","::","RWE"," ","String",", ","rwPasswd","::","RWE"," ","String","}"] Cheers, Lennart K