web dev//crawling//parsing

Parsing is the processing step that turns raw content (HTML, JSON, XML) into a structure a program can interpret, so that a string of characters becomes a title, a link and a paragraph a later stage can address.

Parsing is the processing step that turns raw content (HTML, JSON, XML) into a structure a program can interpret, so that a string of characters becomes a title, a link and a paragraph a later stage can address.

The parser does not decide what matters; it only makes the structure available. What comes out is a tree (for HTML, the same kind of tree a browser builds as its DOM) that later stages walk.

Parsing follows fetching and precedes both scraping, which picks specific data out of the tree, and indexing, which files the whole document. Links found while parsing feed discovery again. Structured formats make parsing cheap and unambiguous, which is the whole argument for Structured Data and for APIs over pages.