I have done quite a bit of work in Erlang over the past 4 or so years. I even wrote an anti-spam engine hat was heavy on parsing.
The best thing Erlang has going in the parsing area is the binary pattern matching, which if you convert a string to a binary works wonders and is much faster. IN fact switching a string to a binary, doing your parsing with binary pattern matching and switching it back to a string CAN be faster in Erlang than using Erlang's string functions.
I won't go into comparisons to other languages, mostly because my personal opinion is that Erlang has so many other great features that not being good at string processing is a minor issue.
The best thing Erlang has going in the parsing area is the binary pattern matching, which if you convert a string to a binary works wonders and is much faster. IN fact switching a string to a binary, doing your parsing with binary pattern matching and switching it back to a string CAN be faster in Erlang than using Erlang's string functions.
I won't go into comparisons to other languages, mostly because my personal opinion is that Erlang has so many other great features that not being good at string processing is a minor issue.