How to create a emulator

Question

i want to create a program which can emulate the A86 assembler (its for my school project)
i am new to java ,this was my yesterdays question : http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5441557&tstart=0
i want my program to parse through a given assembly code and store it in a manner that my emulator(or interpretor) will use it later
i thought of storing those instructions in an sqlite DB
instruction_name| source | destination| etc....etc
MOV |AX |BX |etc etc
and registers and variables will also be stored in different tables
according to the instruction the value of the variable or register will change or act according to the instruction
i just want my program to handle simple programs
this is normally what my parser does for a simple MOV instruction
consider 'S' to be a space
MOVSSAX,BXSSSS;comment
first remove all spaces
MOVAX,BX;comment
split the comment
MOVAX,BX
take the first three-4 alphabets(since most of them are 3-4 lettered ones like MOV,PUSH,POP)
and match them with a instruction
then split using the comma into AX and BX
and insert the  MOV,AX,BX into a tablei just explained my algorithm,is there any better way to do that and sqlite is very slow for the runtime inserts and updates ,is there any way i can represent the same registers and variables in memory instead of using the filesystem

Answer 1

That doesn't sound like you need a database of any kind. I'd simply store the list of instructions in a normal data structure such as a list.
I wouldn't remove all spaces, but replace all whitespace with a single space each. Then you can split on the space.
Removing all space sounds like a bad idea, because then you don't know the exact command (is "MOVAX" a command?" MOVA"? "MOV"? "MO"?).