Threre's also LPeg [1], which I find much nicer than lex and yacc (or flex and bison) for writing parsers. I just finished up a quick hack to pull out a single

Threre's also LPeg [1], which I find much nicer than lex and yacc (or flex and bison) for writing parsers. I just finished up a quick hack to pull out a single file from a git repository into its own repository, and the parsing of the "git fast-export" output is 70 lines of Lua/LPeg. It may sound like quite a bit, but it's a near dump of the BNF you find on the man page [2]. From there, it was simple enough to grovel through the in-memory representation of the git repository and output only what I needed. [1] http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ [3] [2] http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-fast-import.html http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-fast-import.... [3] I actually use the re module [4] as I find the results more readable, and only use the LPeg module when I need something that the re module can't provide. [4] http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/re.html http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/re.html