If you do not mind a small performance hit then a PEG parser combinator library like FastParse (http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/EasyParsingwithParserCombinators.htm

If you do not mind a small performance hit then a PEG parser combinator library like FastParse (http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/EasyParsingwithParserCombinators.html http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/EasyParsingwithParserCombinators...) is basically tooling to help you write recursive descent parsers. Way easier to set up and learn the bison/antlr if you don't need best-of-the-best performance: just import the library, start sketching out how your parser should behave and you're off to the races: parsing, debugging, error-reporting, etc. are all made really easy. At least in the Scala community, FastParse is used quite a lot. Works great for parsing source code, obscure data-formats (textual or binary), user query-languages, etc.. As long as you're not parsing gigabytes of big data, you probably won't even notice the 5-10x performance hit.