I do a lot of text processing in Lua, primarily because of LPeg. It can parse text that regular expressions can't (or have real trouble with, like http://www.e

I do a lot of text processing in Lua, primarily because of LPeg. It can parse text that regular expressions can't (or have real trouble with, like http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html), can transform the data on the fly (convert digit characters into its value) and more importantly, they're composable. Have an LPeg expression that can parse an email address? You can then plop that into a larger LPeg expression to parse, say, a header line.