Well, thank you very much for making me read some articles about the theory of FA :-).

While the patterns I have to search for are more complex than in the example I have mentioned above, I think they are still easy enough to be implemented in form of a linearly scanning state machine, so I think that's the way I will go. If the patterns get more complex, I will extend or rewrite my parser, hoping that I don't end up having to write my own regex parser. Just kidding ...