[T-R]

I get the impression that the Haskell code was meant to be a direct transliteration of the spec, or had some other artificial restriction on the amount of abstraction. Code for "0 or more of any character" is repeated at least 3 times, as with the use of applicative functor operators to ignore separators (a lot of what looks like syntax noise). Things like numbers (takeWhile isDigit_w8) aren't abstracted, either. There's no real reason that these couldn't be abstracted away. Also, some of the verbosity (and most of the imports) come from using Strict 8bit ByteStrings instead of a type with more built-in abstractions. That said, I don't think you can be blamed for your impression.