Confused with syslog message format

Question

I am a bit confused about syslog message format. I have to write a program that parses syslog messages. When I read what I get in my syslog-ng instance I get messages like t

Answer 1

If you have access to the installed syslog-daemon on the system you could configure it to write the logs (received both locally or via network) in a different format. rsyslogd for instance allows to configure your own format (just write a template) and also if I remember correctly has a built-in template to store in json format. And there are libraries in almost any language to parse json.

EDIT: You could also make rsyslogd part of your program. rsyslog is very good in reading incoming syslogs in either of the two RFC formats. You can then use rsyslog to output the message in JSON. This way rsyslog does all the decompositioning of the message for you.