what parsing means?

what parsing means for web development. Things like parsing html, parsing style sheets etc are used. Also web development languages use pa开发者_开发百科rse methods. What is essence parsing means here.

Generally speaking, parsing means inspecting a text string, character by character, and performing certain actions based on the meaning inherent in those characters.

A web browser parses HTML to translate it into blocks of content on the page. It parses style sheets to apply/adjust the styles of those blocks.

By Definition:

Verb: Analyze (a sentence) into its component parts and describe their syntactic roles.

Noun: An act of or the result obtained by parsing a string or a text

Its not specific to web development. Parsing just would mean computing and crunching stuff. Like a web browser parses HTML and displays a web page.