I have always missed the ease provided by Perl in throwing a string at a list of regular expressions. I have thought it would be nice if the (ice-9 regex) module would provide something comparable . So I started work on a macro “regex-case”. Code attached. Comments on syntax appreciated. — Matt === test ================ (define str "foo") (regex-case str (("^([a-z]+)\$([0-9]+)\$$" v i) (list v i)) (("^([a-z]+)$" v) (list v "1”))) => (“foo” “1”) === syntax ============== (regex-case (( …) ) (( …) ) (else ) Where is a string form of a regular expression, … are variables that are bound to the matched subexpressions, and is a list of expressions. The return is the last expression of the matched case. === expansion =========== The example shown above expands to: (let ((t-292 (make-regexp "^([a-z]+)\$([0-9]+)\$$")) (t-293 (make-regexp "^([a-z]+)$"))) (cond ((regexp-exec t-292 str) => (lambda (m) (let ((v (match:substring m 1)) (i (match:substring m 2))) (list v i)))) ((regexp-exec t-293 str) => (lambda (m) (let ((v (match:substring m 1))) (list v "1")))))) I was thinking the above expansion has some chance (if it lives in the regex module?) to memoize the make-regexp part during optimization. If not a macro could be written to generate a match function which can memoize the make-regexp part. (define regex-matcher foo (( …) => (define (let ((t-123 (make-regex )) …) (lambda (str) (cond ((regexp-exec t-123 str) ...