Parsing Techniques?

Question

I am working on a little tool to make it easier to manage some Text-based account files by using the StringTokenizer class. Although, those files have to be built in a very specific way so the program can understand the data correctly. I figured out that surely, my parsing technique wasn't really user-friendly. Since then, I've been wondering what are the best Parsing Techniques that I should use. Taking the example of the Java Compiler, it can understand many code structures, and that's why I'd like to have my program use the best parsing techniques :)
If anyone can point me to:
-tutorials
-APIs
Or if anyone can teach me directly in this post,
I'd be very thankful :)

Answer 1

Here's an extra tip for you. I think you might be better off if you change from an INI-like file format to XML documents. That would enable you to add a degree of validation by creating an XML schema and implementing the existing Java XML parser technology into your product. You probably don't want to do something like that right away, but I'm just saying it's a good thing to consider it for the (near) future.
Example XML based on your example INI:
<account name="AccountName">
<password>password</password>
<level>admin</level>
<lang>en</lang>
<totalconnecttime>845</totalconnecttime>
</account>
<account name="AccountName2">
<password>password</password>
<level>guest</level>
<lang>fra</lang>
<totalconnecttime>157</totalconnecttime>
</account>
With an XML schema, you can specify things such as "totalconnecttime must be numeric" and "lang must be 2 or 3 characters length". By incorporating an existing, validating Java XML parser you have put relatively little effort into validating your files. Effectively, you make your files more reliable this way...