[Haskell-cafe] Alex question

Hi, I want to make Alex to parse a file using states. I wrote a simple basic wrapped .x file but it complaints that it doesn't know the "begin" symbol. As listed here[1], my code does something like this: <0> \/{2} { begin italic } Am I doing something wrong? Should I manage myself the states? Should I use another parser generator? [1]: http://www.haskell.org/alex/doc/html/alex-files.html#startcodes Thanks, -- Mihai