title: What language should I use to write a text parser and display the results in a user friendly manner?
body: <p>My company's proprietary software generates a log file that is much easier to use if it is parsed.  The log parser we all use was written by another employee as a side project, and it has horrible performance.</p>
  
  <p>These log files can grow to 10s of megabytes very quickly, and the parser we currently use has issues if a log file is bigger than 1 megabyte.</p>
  
  <p>So, I want to write a program that can parse this massive amount of text in the shortest amount of time possible.  We use Windows exclusively, so running on Windows is a must.  Our current implementation runs on a local web server, and I'm convinced that running it as an application would have to be faster.</p>
  
  <p>All suggestions will be helpful.  Thanks.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> My ultimate goal is to parse the text and display it in a much more user friendly manner with colors and such.  Can you do this with Perl and Python?  I know you can do this with Java and C++.  So, it will function like Notepad where you open a log file, but on the screen you display the user-friendly format instead of the raw file.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> So, I cant choose the best answer, and that was to choose a language that can best display what I'm going for, and then write the parser in that.  Also, using ANTLR will probably make this process much easier.  I changed the original question, since I guess I didn't ask what I was really looking for.  Thanks everyone!</p>