An example of to parse is to break down a sentence to explain each element to someone.
- to separate (a sentence) into its parts, explaining the grammatical form and function of each of the parts and their interrelation
- to describe the form, part of speech, and function of (a word in a sentence)
- to use analytical skills to interpret or comprehend
Origin of parse; from Classical Latin pars, a part, in quae pars orationis? what part of speech?
- to parse a sentence, word, etc.
- to be capable of being parsed
verbparsed, pars·ing, pars·es
- a. To break (a sentence) down into its component parts of speech with an explanation of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part.b. To describe (a word) by stating its part of speech, form, and syntactical relationships in a sentence.c. To process (linguistic data such as speech or written language) in real time as it is being spoken or read, in order to determine its linguistic structure and meaning.
- a. To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up into components: “What are we missing by parsing the behavior of chimpanzees into the conventional categories recognized largely from our own behavior?” (Stephen Jay Gould).b. To make sense of; comprehend: I simply couldn't parse what you just said.
- Computers To analyze or separate (input, for example) into more easily processed components.
Origin of parseProbably from Middle English pars, part of speech, from Latin pars (&omacron;rati&omacron;nis), part (of speech); see per&schwa;-2 in Indo-European roots.
(third-person singular simple present parses, present participle parsing, simple past and past participle parsed)
- (linguistics) To resolve into its elements, as a sentence, pointing out the several parts of speech, and their relation to each other by government or agreement; to analyze and describe grammatically.
- (computing) To split a file or other input into pieces of data that can be easily stored or manipulated.
- (linguistics, computing) A successful act of parsing.
- (linguistics, computing) The result of such an act.
parse - Computer Definition
To analyze the grammatical structure of a sentence, a character string, or a line of code and separate it into its parts. In order for the routing logic of a system to determine how to route a telephone call originating in the United States, for example, it must parse the dialed digits to determine if the telephone number series begins with 011, indicating that the call is international, or 1, indicating that the call is domestic long distance crossing an area code boundary. See also area code.
(1) To analyze a sentence or language statement. Parsing breaks down words into functional units that can be converted into machine language. For example, to parse the expression sum salary for title = "MANAGER" the word SUM must be identified as the primary command, FOR as a conditional search, TITLE as a field name and MANAGER as the data to be searched. Parsing breaks down a natural language request, such as "What's the total of all the managers' salaries" into the commands required by a high-level language, such as in the example above. See name parsing.
(2) To convert from one format to another. The term is often used as a substitute for the word "convert" when continuous strings of text are scanned to find embedded format codes that must be changed. In contrast, when data are moved between different databases, that is generally known as database "conversion," because the locations of the fields in a database record are easily identified and generally do not have to be searched (scanned) to be found.