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Brilliant, thanks. I'll have to have a play with that.

While you're at it, check out http://piumarta.com/ ;)

Indeed. The peg parser generator is quite nice: http://piumarta.com/software/peg/

I recently used it to implement an s-expression reader: http://zwizwa.be/darcs/libprim/ex/sexp.leg

(It's incomplete, but it illustrates the principle: peg parsing is very nice for quick & dirty parsing work.)