r3d

Yeah it's complicated, and that's the thing about parsing anything, the more complicated and unpredictable the input and the harder it is to parse.

Does it need to be human readable, does it need to work across all platforms. Does the it need to be secure. These things change everything. Speed, reliability, security pick one.

Your point about being compliant with the real spec is the difference between a 20 line scannf and and a 1000 line function. Yeah. Ha.

What do you think the libraries you use to parse these things are doing under the hood?

Maybe you don't care? Fair enough.

Yeah, I agree. But C code parsing is a common and solved problem. The myriad of things people want to store and recover is not though right.

If you created a format that is so difficult to parse that it cannot be parsed with simple readable C code then the problem is the format not the parser code.

It's crazy that human beings with the new fandangled ability to communicate in ever easier ways have created this problem. This is your enemy. Social media, government rules are not the enemy. Nor the saviour you think it might be.