How to define syntax

I am new at language processing and I want to create a parser with Irony for a following syntax:

name1:value1 name2:value2 name3:value ...

where name1 is the name of an xml element and value is the value of the element which can also include spaces.

I have tried to modify included samples like this:

    public TestGrammar()
    {
        var name = CreateTerm("name");
        var value = new IdentifierTerminal("value");

        var queries = new NonTerminal("queries");
        var query = new NonTerminal("query");
        queries.Rule = MakePlusRule(queries, null, query);
        query.Rule = name + ":" + value;
        Root = queries;
    }

    private IdentifierTerminal CreateTerm(string name)
    {
        IdentifierTerminal term = new IdentifierTerminal(name, "!@#$%^*_'.?-", "!@#$%^*_'.?0123456789");
        term.CharCategories.AddRange(new[]
                                         {
                                             UnicodeCategory.UppercaseLetter, //Ul
                                             UnicodeCategory.LowercaseLetter, //Ll
                                             UnicodeCategory.TitlecaseLetter, //Lt
                                             UnicodeCategory.ModifierLetter, //Lm
                                             UnicodeCategory.OtherLetter, //Lo
                                             UnicodeCategory.LetterNumber, //Nl
                                             UnicodeCategor开发者_如何转开发y.DecimalDigitNumber, //Nd
                                             UnicodeCategory.ConnectorPunctuation, //Pc
                                             UnicodeCategory.SpacingCombiningMark, //Mc
                                             UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark, //Mn
                                             UnicodeCategory.Format //Cf
                                         });
        //StartCharCategories are the same
        term.StartCharCategories.AddRange(term.CharCategories);
        return term;
    }

but this doesn't work if the values include spaces. Can this be done (using Irony) without modifying the syntax (like adding quotes around values)?

Many thanks!

If newlines were included between key-value pairs, it would be easily achievable. I have no knowledge of "Irony", but my initial feeling is that almost no parser/lexer generator is going to deal with this given only a naive grammar description. This requires essentially unbounded lookahead.

Conceptually (because I know nothing about this product), here's how I would do it:

Tokenise based on spaces and colons (i.e. every continguous sequence of characters that isn't a space or a colon is an "identifier" token of some sort).

You then need to make it such that every "sentence" is described from colon-to-colon:

sentence = identifier_list
         | : identifier_list identifier : sentence

That's not enough to make it work, but you get the idea at least, I hope. You would need to be very careful to distinguish an identifier_list from a single identifier such that they could be parsed unambiguously. Similarly, if your tool allows you to define precedence and associativity, you might be able to get away with making ":" bind very tightly to the left, such that your grammar is simply:

sentence = identifier : identifier_list

And the behaviour of that needs to be (identifier :) identifier_list.