I'm looking for some advice on VB datastores or parsers that work with VB please...

I've just started to work with VB and I'm not an experienced coder. I'm producing a tool which stops users having to manually edit a MIF (text) file. The tool displays default info. Gets user input and generates a MIF file.

MIF files are plain text files containing header info which is common and won't change and tables which contain rows of comma separated, strictly fomatted data.Basically a configuration file containing header info and tables with rows of parameters. User may add more tables of parameters than was in default config file.

The problem I am having at the moment is the best way of storing the default MIF info so that is easy to accept user changes and generate a new MIF.

I've duplicated the info from a default MIF into an Access database and am finding it easy to read the info into the GUI. The problem comes when I want to generate the new MIF with the user input values from the access db. Its complicated. There is also the question of whether to store the non changing header info.

I've been told that the unix utilities lex and yacc make it easy to write parsers for things like MIF files. I know lex and yacc support C++ code but do any of you know if they support VB - or if there are any parsing utilities for VB which would mean I could use the default MIF to read from\write user values to, removing need to duplicate data in an Access DB and making it very easy to generate a user MIF.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated!

Regards,
Mairi