Why “parse” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
Others mentioned, but to make it more clear, the problem with regex is not that it gets messy/complex, but that it's formally proven that it's not possible to use regex for…
by gebt · Oct 18, 2026
Just as Claude is working in the background to fix any bug it can find in my ancient parser-combinator library in OCaml [0]. It's written in literate programing style, so it's n…
by rixed · Oct 18, 2026
In practice, including a unit test for any nontrivial regex in your application is very helpful. You can demonstrate which sorts of strings are expected to match and, maybe more…
by ryangittins · Oct 18, 2026
If the intention of LLM agents is to be able to parse human intent from natural language, then it is not correct behaviour regardless of the phrase "whatever it takes". On the o…
by fyredge · Oct 18, 2026
Can I parse (X)HTML that way, or should I go back to regex?
by blauditore · Oct 18, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "parse" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "parse" over time.
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part. Read more on Wikipedia