Best method of Textfile Parsing in C#?

Question

I want to parse a config file sorta thing, like so:

[KEY:Value]     
    [SUBKEY:SubValue]

Now I started with a StreamReader, converting lines into character arrays, when I figured there's gotta be a better way. So I ask you, humble reader, to help me.

One restriction is that it has to work in a Linux/Mono environment (1.2.6 to be exact). I don't have the latest 2.0 release (of Mono), so try to restrict language features to C# 2.0 or C# 1.0.

Answer 1

I considered it, but I'm not going to use XML. I am going to be writing this stuff by hand, and hand editing XML makes my brain hurt. :')

Have you looked at YAML?

You get the benefits of XML without all the pain and suffering. It's used extensively in the ruby community for things like config files, pre-prepared database data, etc

here's an example

customer:
  name: Orion
  age: 26
  addresses:
    - type: Work
      number: 12
      street: Bob Street
    - type: Home
      number: 15
      street: Secret Road

There appears to be a C# library here, which I haven't used personally, but yaml is pretty simple, so "how hard can it be?" :-)

I'd say it's preferable to inventing your own ad-hoc format (and dealing with parser bugs)

Answer 2

I was looking at almost this exact problem the other day: this article on string tokenizing is exactly what you need. You'll want to define your tokens as something like:

@"(?&ltlevel>\s) | " +
@"(?&ltterm>[^:\s]) | " +
@"(?&ltseparator>:)"

The article does a pretty good job of explaining it. From there you just start eating up tokens as you see fit.

Protip: For an LL(1) parser (read: easy), tokens cannot share a prefix. If you have abc as a token, you cannot have ace as a token

Note: The article's missing the | characters in its examples, just throw them in.