What Parsing is, in 256 chars or less

This is a submission for DEV Computer Science Challenge v24.06.12: One Byte Explainer.

Explainer

Parsing is analyzing textual input to determine its grammatical structure. It involves transforming the sequence of characters into tokens (lexing) and using those to build a parse or abstract syntax tree according to the rules of a language's syntax.

Additional Context

In the current explainer, I chose to include the concept of lexing (or tokenizing) in that of parsing since it is often what people need to also capture when referring to or inquiring about parsing or language recognition, to be more precise.