Parser combinators basically provide generalized regexes, and they all take lists of arbitrary tokens rather than just Chars. I've written a simple combinator library before that dispenses with all the monadic goodness in favor of a group combinator and returning [Either [tok] [tok]], which sort of gives parsers a simpler regexy flavor (Left is "out of group chunk" and Right is "in group chunk").
foo (match (group any `sepBy` char ';') -> [c1, c2, c3]) = ...
Ah. Is this accessible somewhere?
Unfortunately it's just a toy since it uses the inefficient naive parser combinator thing. I wrote it while reading one of those pre-monadic parser combinator papers. A better version could wrap parsec or ReadP (which unfortunately doesn't seem to be parameterized on the token type). Anyway, in case you're still interested: http://ofb.net/~elaforge/hs/group_parse.hs Excuse the poor quality, it was a long time ago. At the time I was thinking of a regex->parser combinator compiler, with the catch being that you can extend the regex language to include your own parsers, like: let env = [("num", number_in_range 0 255), ("dotted", many1 letter `sepBy` char '.')] p = from_regex env "<num>, +<num>: (<dotted>)" in parse p input You could even have a magic character that makes them be postfix operators, and include combinators:, like "[a-z]<:comma_sep>", but you're probably better off writing a real parser here.