<p>I need to quickly build a parser for a very simplified version of a html-like markup language in Java. In python, I would use pyparsing library to do this. Is there something similar for Java? Please, don't suggest libraries already out there for html parsing, my application is a school assignment which will demonstrate walking a tree of objects and serializing to text using visitor pattern, so I'm not thinking in real world terms here. Basically all I need here is tags, attributes and text nodes.</p>

There are quite a number choices for stringhandling in java. 
Maybe the very basic
```
java.util.Scanner
```
and
```
java.util.StringTokenizer
```
Classes are helpfull for you?
Another good choice is maybe
```
the org.apache.commons.lang.text
```
library.
http://commons.apache.org/lang/apidocs/org/apache/commons/lang/text/package-summary.html