US Patent 6968395 Parsing messages communicated over a data network

A method and apparatus of parsing a message including a string of characters comprises defining at least one character as a delimiter and setting a starting indicator and a closing indicator. A portion of the string between the starting and closing indicators is collected by a parser method, the portion including at least one delimiter character. The delimiter character is ignored by the parser method so that the portion (the token) of the string may be extracted in its entirety. Additional starting and closing indicators may be nested, with the parser method recursively calling itself with each encounter of a new nested starting indicator.