[Haskell-cafe] striping non-alphanumericals

[ok at cs.otago.ac.nz]

> What I want to to there is to get i.e. "word," or "word!" etc. and arrive
> at
> "word". I understand that escapeRe may do this.


Why not do it the easy way?

import Char(isAlpha)

keep_letters = filter isAlphs

Then keep_letters "word," = keep_letters "(w)ord" = "word".

If you are content to work with Unicode, you get use
getLine :: IO ByteString and
splitWith :: (Word8 -> Bool) -> ByteString -> [ByteString]
with predicate not . isAlpha . chr . fromIntegral
and then filter out the empty ByteStrings