History of the Ruby Parser

So, after my last rant, something a little more positive. Anyone whose following the progress of RPGMaker Trans commits (a total of zero people, I'm sure) will know that I''ve been tinkering around with a Ruby parser. Or to be fair, this is actually quite a bit short of a proper parser, as it only needs to extract strings, but I'm calling it a parser for now.

Basically, I've not posted on progress on the Ruby parser because of... well, not using this blog for blogging really. So, for posterity, the current Ruby parser that I'm working on is the 5th generation version. A quick summary of the first four:

1. (Late 2012) (version in game limited beta VX patcher) Simple Ruby based parser, defeated by a multiline string.
2. (Early 2013) Version based on RubyLexer, defeated by bugs in RubyLexer which probably have no chance of being fixed, and having very unhelpful descriptions (e.g. "appear to be off by 1 sometimes" ... sometimes? Seriously?)
3. (Summer 2013) Version based on RubyRipper: Promising, until I realised that Ripper is only compatible with Ruby 1.9; VX uses Ruby 1.8, and Ruby doesn't really do backwards compatibility. There is an unofficial port to 1.8, but I could never get it to compile as it requires an older version of YACC, but they don't specify which version of YACC is required.
4. (Late 2013/Early 2014) Complex Ruby parser: defeated by realisation that Ruby 1.8 struggles with encoded files, that Ruby 1.8 can be in one of four encodings, and that I'm really not a good enough Ruby programmer to do it.

The current version is written in Python, like most of RPGMaker Trans. Whilst it is still very incomplete, I actually have a plan for most things and the (most) worrisome features are pretty much all implemented. Or at least, the most worrisome features that I know about, given my somewhat limited knowledge of Ruby...

In any case, watch this space... 5th time lucky and all that.