What Is Parsing in Terms That a New Programmer Would Understand? [Closed]

Question

I am a college student getting my Computer Science degree. A lot of my fellow students really haven't done a lot of programming. They've done their class assignments, but let's be honest here those questions don't really teach you how to program.

I have had several other students ask me questions about how to parse things, and I'm never quite sure how to explain it to them. Is it best to start just going line by line looking for substrings, or just give them the more complicated lecture about using proper lexical analysis, etc. to create tokens, use BNF, and all of that other stuff? They never quite understand it when I try to explain it.

What's the best approach to explain this without confusing them or discouraging them from actually trying.

Accepted Answer

I'd explain parsing as the process of turning some kind of data into another kind of data.

In practice, for me this is almost always turning a string, or binary data, into a data structure inside my Program.

For example, turning

":Nick!User@Host PRIVMSG #channel :Hello!"

into (C)

struct irc_line {
    char *nick;
    char *user;
    char *host;
    char *command;
    char **arguments;
    char *message;
} sample = { "Nick", "User", "Host", "PRIVMSG", { "#channel" }, "Hello!" }

Answer 2

Parsing is the process of analyzing text made of a sequence of tokens to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given (more or less) formal grammar.

The parser then builds a data structure based on the tokens. This data structure can then be used by a compiler, interpreter or translator to create an executable program or library.

_{(source: wikimedia.org)}

If I gave you an english sentence, and asked you to break down the sentence into its parts of speech (nouns, verbs, etc.), you would be parsing the sentence.

That's the simplest explanation of parsing I can think of.

That said, parsing is a non-trivial computational problem. You have to start with simple examples, and work your way up to the more complex.

Answer 3

Must Read

What is parsing?

In computer science, parsing is the process of analysing text to determine if it belongs to a specific language or not (i.e. is syntactically valid for that language's grammar). It is an informal name for the syntactic analysis process.

For example, suppose the language a^n b^n (which means same number of characters A followed by the same number of characters B). A parser for that language would accept AABB input and reject the AAAB input. That is what a parser does.

In addition, during this process a data structure could be created for further processing. In my previous example, it could, for instance, to store the AA and BB in two separate stacks.

Anything that happens after it, like giving meaning to AA or BB, or transform it in something else, is not parsing. Giving meaning to parts of an input sequence of tokens is called semantic analysis.

What Is Parsing in Terms That a New Programmer Would Understand? [Closed]

8 Answers

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What is parsing?

Elena Rostova