[Haskell-beginners] How to make this more functional?

[Jeffrey Brown]

I wrote a 10-line program[1] for converting from org-mode format to
smsn-mode format. Both formats use indentation to indicate hierarchy. In
org, a line at level k (levels are positive integers) starts with k
asterisks, followed by a space, followed by the text of the line. In
smsn-mode, a line at level k starts with 4*(k-1) spaces, followed by an
asterisks, followed by a space.

I feel like there ought to be an intermediate step where it converts the
data to something other than string -- for instance,

data IndentedLine = IndentedLine Int String | BadLine

and then generates the output from that. It feels like it needs a parser.
But when I resurrect my parser code that I understood many moons ago, it
looks like a lot of machinery.

Thanks.

[1] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn-mode/blob/develop/org-to-smsn-mode.hs

-- 
Jeff Brown | Jeffrey Benjamin Brown
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