Parse is a term that is used to describe many types of actions in coding but the most common use is to describe the extraction of chars from strings or words or sentences, etc. from strings. For instance
If you needed to find only the last name in a large buffer (dougxwhitex42xone old ferry rd.x)
You could parse out the string following the first x to obtain the last name (the x is a delimiter in this buffer). Parsing strings is a difficult task but is often a must do when obtaining line input from the console. Adding on the features of .NET to create windows application allows for nice forms to extract these values.