Parsing

Reading text and working out its structure: turning the characters 03/04/2025 into a date, or one line of a file into separate fields.

Parsing can fail loudly, by rejecting the text, or quietly, by producing a wrong value. The quiet failures do the damage.

Where it comes up

Mixed date formatsOne column holds dates written in several different styles.
Numbers stored as textA column of quantities contains symbols, separators, or words that stop software reading it as numbers.

Data typeThe kind of value a column holds, such as text, whole number, decimal, date, or true and false. The type decides what operations make sense.
Type coercionConverting a value from one data type to another, such as the text 1,200 to the number 1200. It may be requested, or done automatically by software.
DelimiterThe character that separates values: the comma between fields in a CSV file, or the semicolon between items in a list packed into one cell.

Karg checks for many of these when it profiles a file, applies the fixes it is confident about, and sets the rest aside for your review. See how it works, or have our team clean your data for you.