An Extensible Markup Language (XML) parser is software that can process or read XML documents to extract the data within them. XML parsers also check the syntax or rules of the XML file and can validate it against a particular XML schema. Because XML is a strict markup language, the parsers will not process the file if there are any validation or syntax errors. For example, the XML parser will give errors if any of these conditions are true:
A closing tag or end tag is missing
Attribute values don’t have quotation marks
A schema condition has not been met
Software applications use XML parsers to transform XML files into native data types. They can thus focus on the application logic without having to go into the details of the XML itself.