Most succinct way to parse an HTTP header string

[David Crayford <dcrayford@...>]

I've ported Lua to IBM mainframes and it's a joy and very fast, in some 
cases by over an order of magnitude. However, selling it is going to be 
difficult to the masses that grew up on REXX.

I want to parse a HTTP header string "name:value" pair. In REXX this is 
quite simple with the parse instruction, "parse var line name ":" 
value". In lua it seems much trickier using
the example i have "local _, _, name, value = string.find(line, "^([^: 
]+)%s*:%s*(.+)")". I understand that captures are much more powerful but 
what I want is to dumb them down so there
is a lower entry level of skill required to do what is simple in REXX. 
Maybe it's possible to write a parse(line,"%s : %s:) function or 
something similar. It's most likely the case that I just don't
know Lua string handling well enough to grok what is the best solution.