What is Parsing?

What is parsing and why do I need to learn about it?

If you look at Wikipedia or the more technical articles on the web, it seems parsing, as it is related to programming, is a pretty complicated subject. It talks about programming codes and syntax. It also talks about how parsing is done between and among different programming languages.

I am not really an expert in this field (though my brother might be able to explain it to me in layman's terms since he graduated in IT and is taking up Masters in IT right now). But if you have a blog, nowadays it seems that to be a blogger means you have to have at least a certain amount of understanding about programming. You need to know the basics if you want to keep up with the others. And you need to know more advanced techniques if you want to have that X-factor.

But if you ask me, I would rather spend more time writing posts. That's why I am always on the lookout for shortcuts from the internet. And for instant parsing, I found some websites and blog communities that provide parsing resources. For example, blogcrowds.com offers parsing HTML to XML Blogger. This feature is specially important if you have HTML codes that you want to include in your XML Blogger template. I plan to use this for parsing Adsense code to embed in my Blogger posts.

Thanks to sites like these, I can now focus more on blogging and less on programming.