Parsing – A Brief Study

Abstract

Parsing is a technique to determine how a string might be derived using productions (rewrite rules) of a given grammar. It can be used to check whether or not a string belongs to a given language. When a statement written in a programming language is input, it is parsed by a compiler to check whether or not it is syntactically correct and to extract components if it is correct. Finding an efficient parser is a nontrivial problem and a great deal of research has been conducted on parser design. This paper basically serves the purpose of elaborating the concept of parsing.