In my best Homer Simposon voice - "unfoldr - is there anything it can't do?" I have strange unfoldr love right now. I'm probably too impressed by this function, but it takes a string and splits it into a list of words, while keeping "quoted" phrases together: import Data.List phrasesAndWords :: String -> [String] phrasesAndWords = let startsWith w c = [c] `isPrefixOf` w endsWith w c = [c] `isSuffixOf` w buildPhrases [] = Nothing buildPhrases (w:ws) | w `startsWith` '"' = -- A word starts with a '"', now look for ending '"' let (p, rest) = break (`endsWith` '"') (w:ws) in case () of () | null p -> Just ((init . tail) w, ws) -- single word in quotes | null rest -> Just ((tail . unwords) p, rest) -- No ending quote -- Some amount of words in the phrase and some not | otherwise -> Just ((init . tail) (unwords (p ++ [head rest])), tail rest) | otherwise = Just (w, ws) in -- Use of words makes sure any valid quotes appear at beginning or -- end of a word. unfoldr buildPhrases . words Of course it's not a full parser (no nested quotes or escaping) but who would think unfoldr could do that? Justin p.s. Style comments, improvements welcome.