A log parser extracts (usually text) data from a log file into a more specific data structure, making the log information easier to process. A log parser can be implemented as a standalone application, or as a library for a specific programming language. LogParser is also the name of a free Microsoft tool which provides a SQL-like interface to log files of almost any format, from generic CSV, TSV, and XML files to more specific formats.
Many server-side applications create log files, usually in a more-or-less structured text format.
While this allows for maximum flexibility in accessing these logs with a wide variety of tools, it makes programmatic processing a bit of a pain, especially when no concise format specification is available for the logs.
This is where a log parser comes in: it is either a standalone application or a library designed for one or sometimes multiple programming languages, and converts the log file into more specific data structures, such rows in an Excel sheet or class instances.
The newly created data structures contain field names and are type-safe as much as possible, making further processing much easier.
