I was reading somewhere on a blog and the blogger had written about a writing a "parser". (link: http://silentmac.com/) I'm curious. What is a parser (in the way the blogger is referring to one)?
A parser is a script written to extract information from an unstructured page, typically a HTML page. They simply use patterns to find the start and end of each bit of information they need.. In your case someone did just that to find out their total apple app store earnings.
Thanks for the response. Does that mean a parser could be used to extract information displayed in a <table> by looking for the <table> tags?
Yes, if you know exactly in which fields. Though there are two kinds of parsers for HTML, the regular old parser simply looks at patterns: <tr>.*</tr> to match everything in a row.. The new one uses the DOM (the browser object model) so that you can navigate and parse exactly as you would in HTML.