[antlr-interest] Curiosity question

[Alain Perry]

Hi there,

I'm an absolute newbie when it comes to lexers and parsers. I might
have fiddled some with lex- and yacc-style tools while I was a CS
student, but not much of it has been left in my volatile brain.

The thing is, I'm curious if a tool like antlr is the right one for a
particular job: I need (surprise) to parse some strings that contain
tokens of interest. Thing is, these tokens are incredibly loosely
defined. Here are some examples where I need to detect the part
between braces (the braces aren't there in the real world):

[123456] this is some sample text
[12:34] this is some more sample text
[123456] some more...
[12:34:56^2] another example
[12:34:56 at bleh] still another
[12:34:56^1 at blah] and a last one, just for the fun of it.

On the contrary, the strings [12345], [1234567], [12:34:5] etc. should
not be detected as a token of interest.

So as I said above, my question is: should I be using antlr to detect
these things ? Should I stick with regex'es ?

To be honest and since I'm a playful type of guy, I started writing a
grammar definition for my problem. I might post it here to treat you
all knowledgeable people to a good laugh. But I might be interested
first in any online (and free, for the time being) resource you would
point me to in order to not make to much of a fool of myself and get
to know more about this stuff in a practical and not too theoretical
kind of way.

Now, let me just thank you for reading till this point.

Regards,

--
Alain Perry