What does a parser do?

[mahela007]

What is a parser and what does it do?
For example, what would an HTML parser do in python?

[iamthwee]

They're special functions designed to make your life EASIER for reading and writing, in this example, HTML.

[Maniraj Patri]

They're special functions designed to make your life EASIER for reading and writing, in this example, HTML.

Paser can thought of a computer program whch is used to translate one form of information to another form of information.

Thanks,
Maniraj Patri

[Gribouillis]

Parsing often means "perform syntax analysis" on a program or a text. It means check if a text obeys given grammar rules and extract the corresponding information. For example, suppose that you define the rule that the structure of a question in english is auxiliary verb + subject + main verb + rest . Then the output of the statement parse("Are they playing football?") could be a hierarchy of tuples, or other objects, like this

("question",
    ("auxiliary verb", "are"),
    ("subject", "they"),
    ("verb", "playing"),
    ("rest", "football"),
)

Programs and compilers handle such trees more easily than raw text.

[mahela007]

Thanks for the help..