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I want to build a compiler or my own parsing engine

Are you technically inclined? Have you checked out the latest microsoft, gnu, sun, intel and borland compilers and said to yourself me to or I can do better? Well you had better wipe that smirk off your face because your in for a ride. There is more to building a compiler than reading in a file parsing the contents and vomiting machine code. I don't necessarliy want to get into all the gory details myself, but would like to provide a helpful starting point in case you want to write a config file parser that isn't necessarily too complex, but gives you the fundamentals to be on your way. You might think that  a conf file and a c file might be totally different, however, they are both files that contain textual information that gets processed into tokens and translated into some other form to be useful to a computer.

Building a parsing Engine

It is difficult, time consuming and error prone to create your own parsing engine, and is is often the mistake of novice programmers to try and reinvent the wheel without a real need. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I enjoy the occassional challenge of duplication a particularly interesting bit of code in my own right, however, there is often no need and often we re-create issues that have already been fixed in existing solutions. There are needs, however, that sometimes are not fullfilled in a particular bit of software that we need to overcome. At any rate, building a parsing engine is not necessarily an easy task even for those who have been doing it for considerable amounts of time, and I believe it is because the concerns about security, stability and reliability never go away.