Question

Before I dive into ANTLR (because it is apparently not for the faint of heart), I just want to make sure I have made the right decision regarding its usage.

I want to create a grammar that will parse in a text file with predefined tags so that I can populate values within my application. (The text file is generated by another application.) So, essentially, I want to be able to parse something like this:

Name: TheFileName
Values: 5 3 1 6 1 3
Other Values: 5 3 1 5 1

In my application, TheFileName is stored as a String, and both sets of values are stored to an array. (This is just a sample, the file is much more complicated.) Anyway, am I at least going down the right path with ANTLR? Any other suggestions?

Edit
The files are created by the user and they define the areas via tags. So, it might look something like this.

Name: <string>TheFileName</string>
Values: <array>5 3 1 6 1 3</array>
Important Value: <double>3.45</double>

Something along those lines.

Answer 1

The basic question is how is the file more complicated? Is it basically more of the same, with a tag, a colon and one or more values, or is the basic structure of the other lines more complex? If it’s basically just more of the same, code to recognize and read the data is pretty trivial, and a parser generator isn’t likely to gain much. If the other lines have substantially different structure, it’ll depend primarily on how they differ.

Edit: Based on what you’ve added, I’d go one (tiny) step further, and format your file as XML. You can then use existing XML parsers (and such) to read the files, extract data, verify that they fit a specified format, etc.