Package lexmachine is a full lexical analysis framework for the Go programming language. It supports a restricted but usable set of regular expressions appropriate for writing lexers for complex programming languages. The framework also supports sub-lexers and non-regular lexing through an "escape hatch" which allows the users to consume any number of further bytes after a match. So if you want to support nested C-style comments or other paired structures you can do so at the lexical analysis stage. For a tutorial see http://hackthology.com/writing-a-lexer-in-go-with-lexmachine.html Example of defining a lexer Example of using a lexer