A method and apparatus for providing an adaptive parser are disclosed. For example, the method receives a configuration for a router, and parses a command from the configuration. The method determines whether there is an existing entry for the command in a model of a configuration language, wherein the model of the configuration language is used to record a syntactic structure of each command in the configuration language and its relationship to other commands. The method creates a new entry for the command in the model of the configuration language, if there is no existing entry for the command; and uses the model to update the parser.