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Posted by Alex Davis III
Alex Davis III
12,138 Points

Question About Parser

I have seen this word used frequently (the word being "parse"). What is a parser and what does it mean to "parse" something?

1 Answer

Joseph Mudd
Joseph Mudd
11,665 Points
Joseph Mudd
Joseph Mudd
11,665 Points

In general it means to read an input and interpret it according to some rules. So you can parse a sentence by reading it and analyzing its grammatical parts. In programming, compilers have an early parsing stage where the high-level code is broken down into a structured representation according to the rules of the language to prepare for further processing. And a function like parseInt() in Javascript is reading an input and trying to interpret it as an integer.