Parsing freeform Text

[umgefahren]

I'm trying to build a parser with this library for CookLang. How do I parse free form text and extract values from that?
Do I have to use the lexer? I'm quite new to all of this...

[alecthomas]

Participle's documentation is not really designed to explain the basics of parsing. However, if you follow the tutorial, and look up some of the basic concepts such as the difference between lexing and parsing, you should be able to make it work.

Lexing basically splits the text into separate types of fragments (tokens), such as strings, numbers, whitespace, identifiers, etc. Parsing then enforces a structure on those tokens.