I hope this is the correct mailing list do address parsec related questions. There is a question about parsec which I hope you could help. According to the documentation space parser recognizes '\n' as a space character. I am implementing a Basic parser where newline is important. For example, now the parser accepts the expression: a = 1 + 2 as equivalent to "a= 1 + 2" when it shouldn't. If this was the only problem, it wouldn't be a big deal. However, in basic, a function call is not required to enclose the arguments with parenthesis. Thus, the expressions: myFunc anOtherFunc arg1, arg2 are valid. Since the newline is skipped, when the parser tries to match the optional arguments of myFunc, it will search them in the line below. The parser will consume characters and will fail. What I tried to do is: imported the Parsec module, hiding the `space`. Reimplemented the space parser as space = oneOf [' ', '\t'] The parser behaved the same. Afterwords, I implemented the whiteSpace parser as whiteSpace = skipMany space This didn't work either.