To analyze the grammatical structure of a sentence, a character string, or a line of code and separate it into its parts. In order for the routing logic of a system to determine how to route a telephone call originating in the United States, for example, it must parse the dialed digits to determine if the telephone number series begins with 011, indicating that the call is international, or 1, indicating that the call is domestic long distance crossing an area code boundary. See also area code.