Tokenizing and parsing pairs of strings with Jison (or Bison)

Question

I'm trying to build a parser with Jison (a node.js implementation of Bison) to parse a file that looks like this:

---
Redirect Test Patterns
---

one.html /two/
one/two.html /three/four/
one /two
one/two/ /three
one/two/ /three/four
one/two /three/four/five/
one/two.html http://three.four.com/
one/two/index.html http://three.example.com/four/
one http://two.example.com/three
one/two.pdf https://example.com
one/two?query=string /three/four/
go.example.com https://example.com

The goal

This is a file that stores redirection paths/URLs. There are other scripts that refer to this file when they need to know how to redirect a user. The goal is to develop a parser that I can run every time someone attempts to save the file. That way, I can make sure it's always formatted properly.

Basically, everything inside the --- block is to be ignored, as well as any empty lines. Each of the remaining lines represent a "redirection record".

For each "redirection record", it must have the following structure:

INPUT_URL_OR_PATH <space> OUTPUT_URL_OR_PATH

In other words, there is to be a single space separating two strings.

What I have done so far

I am very new to grammars/parsing, so please bear with me.

The language grammar I have sketched out looks like this:

file -> lines EOF

lines -> record
lines -> lines record

record -> INPATH SPACE OUTPATH

The terminal symbols include: EOF, INPATH, SPACE, OUTPATH.

Unfortunately, I am not even at the point where I can implement that yet because I am having trouble developing my lexer.

This is what my jison file looks like:

/* description: Parses a list of redirects */

/* lexical grammar */
%lex

%x comment

%%

"---"                 this.begin("comment")
<comment>"---"        this.popState()
<comment>[\n]         /* skip new lines */
<comment>.            /* skip all characters */

[ \t\n]               /* do nothing */
(\w+)                 return 'WORD'
<<EOF>>               return 'EOF'
.                     /* do nothing */

/lex

/* operator associations and precedence */

/* n/a */

%start file

%% /* language grammar */

file
  : lines EOF
      { console.log($1); return $1; }
  | EOF
      { const msg = 'The target file is empty';
        console.log(msg);
        return msg; }
  ;

lines
  : lines WORD
      { console.log('WORD ', $2) }
  | WORD
      { console.log('WORD ', $1) }
  ;

Clearly, I am very far from being done. I am currently stuck on several things all at the same time.

Things I'm stuck on

1. Being able to skip empty lines;
2. Tokenizing INPATH, SPACE, OUTPATH, and;
3. Using left-recursion in the language grammar section as opposed to right-recursion (What's the difference? Am I even doing it right? What's the best option here?).

In other words, I have no idea what I'm doing and could really use some help.

EDIT I'm going to attempt to do more research and hopefully eventually answer my own question.