A good in-between option is a parser generator like Ragel ,http://www.colm.net/open-source/ragel/

This takes in the definition of a regular language as a set of regular expressions, and generates C code for finite state machine to parse the language. You can visualise the state machine in Graphviz to manually verify all paths, making it much easier to spot hidden corner cases, while being a lot quicker to code than a big pile of if statements.