What is parsing in simple words

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gafimiv406
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What is parsing in simple words

Post by gafimiv406 »

Parsing is the process of collecting, systematizing and converting information openly posted on web resources using special software. It is used when it is necessary to collect a large amount of disparate data from specific sites, structure it and give it a convenient form for use for specific purposes. When parsing, a person only sets the parameters by which the search should be carried out, and robots do the rest automatically.
In this article, we will tell you why this is necessary, how it works, and what information is most often the target of parsing.

What is parsing for?
The Internet stores huge amounts of data — too much to be examined manually. It can take tens or even hundreds of hours to analyze one online store with several thousand items — let alone the need to study 10–15 similar resources, which often arises when forming a company’s marketing strategy? Parsing solves this problem. It eliminates the need to manually collect and structure the required information. It is worth noting that this procedure often acquires a negative connotation. Many people and organizations bahamas whatsapp number database perceive it as something akin to theft, but if the data is publicly available and there is no copyright on it, parsing it is a legal way to speed up the work that would have been done by people anyway. Another matter is what will be done with the information received next.

What is parsing in simple words.
A natural question arises: why would you need to parse any information at all? We answer. As a rule, parsing is used for:

Analysis of pricing policy , tracking of product promotions and assortment of competitors and/or suppliers. To withstand competition in the market, you need to know what you are competing with and what the market situation is. To do this, companies conduct "reconnaissance": monitor prices on competitors' websites, look through catalogs, monitor product turnover and sales volumes of similar companies. All this is possible thanks to parsing, because without it, collecting all the necessary data would be much more difficult. It also helps in cases where the supplier's website does not allow you to quickly transfer the product database.
SEO optimization . Parsers are often used to extract metadata from other web resources. SEO specialists copy the content of tags to optimize their own website. For the same purpose, they parse keywords to create a semantic core. This is a popular audit method. No less common is the so-called " self-parsing " - an analysis of your resource for broken links, errors, duplicates, non-existent pages, incomplete descriptions or discrepancies between real warehouse balances and the numbers indicated in the catalog.
Content acquisition . Parsing is used to collect descriptions for similar products that are widely available on the market. This is not always ethical, but in areas such as pharmaceuticals, the characteristics of drugs are factual information and therefore cannot be “plagiarized.” However, this significantly saves time on filling product positions.
What is a parser and how to use it
Simply put, a parser is the robot that does all the work. It can exist in the form of a program, an online service, a script, a browser extension - in general, software or an algorithm that specifies a sequence of actions aimed at finding and processing the specified information. You can create a parser yourself for your tasks, or you can use an existing one - the choice of both paid and free options is huge.

The principle of its work is based on comparing the selected template with the data it finds on the pages of websites. Parsers see them differently than people. They perceive only code and text content, but this does not mean that they do not have access to information from images. Nowadays, parsers can extract text even from images.
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