[norir]

I feel that most of the time the two options are presented as either write a handwritten parser or use a parser generator. A nice third way is to write a custom parser generator for the language you wish to parse. Handwritten parsers do tend to get unwieldy and general purpose parser generators can have inscrutable behavior for any specific language.

Because the grammar for a parser generator is usually much simpler than most general purpose programming languages, it is typically relatively straightforward to handwrite a parser for it.

[dboreham]

You could write a language with which to specify that custom parser. Oh wait...