I'm writing an NNTP client API. When I connect with connectTo, I get a Handle 'h'. I immediately hGetContents h to get a string 'c' that I hope contains all the data the server will ever send. I put h and c in a data Connection and pass it to the functions that send or receive. I send a command and receive a response. The response might look like "200 OK\r\n". Parsec parses c. No problem. But if I send another command and receive another response, parsec parses the same string because (I think) I haven't trimmed the part I parsed on the previous command. Maybe c looks like "200 OK\r\n200 second thing\r\n". So I was thinking I need to parse and return the unparsed part so that the next parse will work. Parsec has a getInput that returns the unparsed part, but it blocks if there is no more to parse. That is, after I parse "200 OK\r\n", if I ask parsec for the "rest", it blocks because there isn't any "rest" yet. How should I be doing this? Before people suggest I hGetLine and parse that, I don't like hGetLine for this because 1) it assumes '\n' signifies the end of a line, whereas in my case the protocol specifies "\r\n" and 2) if the "line" doesn't have an ending, I can't tell it from what hGetLine returns. That is, hGetLine on a handle having "abc\n" returns the same thing as on a handle having "abc". Also, if I can parse c directly, I can write parsers (especially those for multiline respones) much more naturally than I can if I have to get lines separately. Thanks very much for any help.