Discourse is a markup language for defining conversation in video games. The default extension for discourse files is .ds.
You can read more about it here.
Running
./parser.lua ./examples/example_1.txt
will transform a discourse script into a lua table.
Note: Currently it will also spew out a load of debug information before that table.
The discourse parser is functional and for me that's probably enough but here are some thoughts about language extensions and different approaches to writing the parser.
Whitespace in discourse is fluid, it can change; lines can be combined, space can be trimmed. This means the tags are hard to correctly position as an offset, that offset can change when the whitespace changes. A better solution might be an non-whitespace offset. In this way the tags will stick to the words.
It would be nice to have comments. C style // would be enough.