[Haskell-beginners] Parsec, parsing 'free text'

[Franco]

I am using Parsec as my parsing library and quite liking it: though, I am unsure on how to properly tackle a 'free element' problem. Let me explain:

In my file, there are some elements which look like this:

this is some <red - formatted> text.

I call this a FormatString. They can be found inside many elements, like:

[ someconditions | this is some <red - formatted> text.]
+ this is some <red - formatted> text. -> somenumberhere

To parse a FormatString I call 'generalText', which looks like this:

 56 -- TEXT --
 57 
 58 generalText      = many anyText >>= \fss ->
 59                    return (foldl (+:+%) (toFString "" []) fss)
 60 
 61 anyText          =   try ( formattedText )
 62                  <|> plainText
 63 
 64 formattedText = char '<'                    >>
 65                 sepEndBy1 format spacebar   >>= \fs -> -- format parser
 66                 string "- "                 >>
 67                 manyTill anyChar (char '>') >>= \cs ->
 68                 return (toFString cs fs)
 69 
 70 plainText     = many1 (noneOf "<") >>= \xs ->
 71                 return (toFString xs [])
                  
It works, but causes quite some headaches in using it:

	- I would like to call a "read with generalText until you find a ']' character.
	- or a "read with generalText until you find a " -> " (do not consume it)

And the like, but I do not know how. If it were a plain string I would call manyTill1 anyChar myP. I thought of first parsing a raw string searching for a terminator and then feeding it to generalText. But isn't that cluncky codewise?

Thanks for your help
-F