Except when you work on embedded systems (I'm talking about the type where you have a few hundred kilobytes of ram and flash, no OS under your ass and crap libr

Except when you work on embedded systems (I'm talking about the type where you have a few hundred kilobytes of ram and flash, no OS under your ass and crap libraries). I've used a recursive descent parsing technique that's described in a paper of about 5 pages by David Hanson to great effect [1]. Depends on the situation you find yourself in, sometimes it's unavoidable to re-invent the wheel. [1] http://drhanson.s3.amazonaws.com/storage/documents/compact.pdf http://drhanson.s3.amazonaws.com/storage/documents/compact.p...