Quickly processing "Lua" files

["Soni \"They/Them\" L." <fakedme@...>]

Hello!

I need a simple and quick way to process valid Lua files. Namely, I need 
to look at the space between freeform text (strings, comments, etc), and 
potentially modify it. However, one must note that such freeform text 
may appear in tables, or in indexing operations, or in function calls, 
and so on, and I need to be able to handle that as well.

Is there an easy way to scan "Lua" files for lexical tokens and being 
able to rearrange them without going with a full parser?