tables as parsers

["Soni \"They/Them\" L." <fakedme@...>]

I'm rolling with this weird idea. is it possible to make a simple parser 
out of tables? I tried some stuff but ran into a few issues. I don't 
wanna use LPeg or anything more complicated than string.find(foo, bar, 
1, true).

e.g.:

local ltk = {} -- lua_tokens
ltk.string = {}
ltk['"'] = "string"
ltk["'"] = "string" -- how to handle end of string correctly?
ltk.string['\\'] = "escape"
ltk.string.escape = {}
ltk.string.escape['z'] = {}
ltk.string.escape['z'].next = ltk.string.escape['z']
for i, v in ipairs({" ", "\t", "\n", etc}) do
  ltk.string.escape['z'][v] = "next"
end
ltk.string.escape['z'][''] = ltk.string -- not sure if there'd be a 
better way to do this
-- etc