In EVE when a player is killed in PVP a killmail is created, the EVElopedia wiki has a nice page about killmails. A killmail looks something like this:

2009.05.11 02:37

Victim: Noob
Corp: Random Corp
Alliance: Random Alliance
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Crow
System: Amarr
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 595

Involved parties:

Name: Killer (laid the final blow)
Security: 2.6
Corp: NONE
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Sabre
Weapon: 200mm AutoCannon II
Damage Done: 595

Destroyed items:

TE-2100 Standard Missile Bay
TE-2100 Standard Missile Bay
Bloodclaw Light Missile, Qty: 46
Warp Scrambler II
Overdrive Injector System II
Overdrive Injector System II

Dropped items:

Bloodclaw Light Missile, Qty: 92
TE-2100 Standard Missile Bay
1MN MicroWarpdrive I
Warp Disruptor II
Beta Reactor Control: Capacitor Power Relay I
Bloodclaw Light Missile, Qty: 150 (Cargo)

So a bit of regular text, with a rather simple formatting. Now on to the fun part: parsing! Usually I use regex to parse text, it's easy and fun however for this it seemed a bit overkill, since the format of the data i rather static, the only thing that might change is the amount of 'nodes' under Involved parties. To make the whole thing simpler, for my current purposes I don't have a need for the destroyed/dropped items only victim and involved players. So i decided to go with the simples solution: a StringReader. So i started building a small class to handle the parsing for me, i even did it the TDD way, it's a rather simple flow. Load the text, read it line by line and create objects that can be returned as a Kill object containing the parsed killmail. So the only public method in my parser class looks like this:

        public Kill ParseKillMail(string killMail)
        {
            StringReader reader = new StringReader(killMail);
            Kill kill = new Kill();

            try
            {
                kill.IncidentTime = GetIncidentTime(reader);
                MoveReader(reader, 1);
                kill.Victim = GetVictim(reader);
                MoveReader(reader, 3);
                GetInvolvedPlayers(kill, reader, kill.Victim.SystemSeen);
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {
                kill.IsComplete = false;
            }
            return kill;
        }

The GetIncidentTime method looks almost the same as the previous post on twitter date parsing, MoveReader just moves the reader X lines, handy since we do that a lot. The GetVictim method reads the first large block of text and converts it into a player object

        private Player GetVictim(StringReader reader)
        {
            Player P= new Player();
            List victim = ReadLines(reader, 8);
            P.Name = victim[0].Replace("Victim: ", "");
            P.Corporation = victim[1].Replace("Corp: ", "");
            P.Alliance = victim[2].Replace("Alliance: ", "");
            P.Faction = victim[3].Replace("Faction: ", "");
            P.Ship = victim[4].Replace("Destroyed: ", "");
            P.SystemSeen = victim[5].Replace("System: ", "");

            return P;
        }

After this we move the reader 3 lines down to start reading the list of involved players, since there can be 1..n players in that list that code is wrapped in a loop

        private void GetInvolvedPlayers(Kill kill, StringReader reader, string seen)
        {
            kill.Involved.Add(GetInvolved(reader, seen));
            MoveReader(reader,1);
            while(HasMoreInvolved(reader))
            {
                kill.Involved.Add(GetInvolved(reader, seen));
            }
        }

The HasMoreInvolved call simply does a peek to check the next character to see if we have more players involved (row starting with a 'N' for Name)

        private bool HasMoreInvolved(StringReader reader)
        {
            return ((char) reader.Peek() == 'N');
        }

GetInvolved looks almost the same as GetVictim just some slight changes to handle the data included. I've included the code + unit tests as a zip if anyone wants a peek at it. Code: killmailparser