parsing

Usually applied to the action of a compiler in analyzing a program source file for syntax errors. It is also used more widely to mean the analysis of the structure of input.

The subtle but sometimes brutal art of attempting to turn your possibly malformed program into a valid "syntax tree".

The process of analyzing input to determine its grammatical structure with respect to formal grammar. A parser is a computer program that carries out this task. Parsing transforms input text into a data structure, usually a tree, which is suitable for later processing and which captures the implied hierarchy of the input. Generally, parsers operate in two stages, first identifying the meaningful tokens in the input and then building a parse tree from those tokens.