Hi, all, thanks for the further inputs, all good stuff to think about... although it's going to be a little while before I can appreciate the inner beauty of Doaitse's version! :-) I had considered the approach of doing a post-parsec verification, but decided I wanted to keep it all inside the parser, hence the desire to match prefixes there (and lack of desire to write 'string "p" <|> string "pr" <|> string "pre" ...'. By way of background, the actual stuff I'm wanting to match is not food names, but some commands for a small ledger program I'm working on. I needed something like that and was tired of losing data to quicken every so often. I realize of course that there are other excellent ledger-type programs out there, but hey, I also needed another hacking project. I'll put this onto hackage in a while, once it does most of the basics of what I need. No doubt the main differentiator between mine and those other excellent ledger programs out there will be that mine has fewer features and more bugs... thanks again, all! Uwe