There are cases in which some or all of the data we need is in a condensed form. An example includes flat files of healthcare survey data in which each survey is encoded as an N-character string, with the characters at each position corresponding to specific survey responses. In these cases, the data we want must be broken down into its various components and converted into a useful format before we can use it. We refer to this activity as parsing. Even data that is expressed using particular medical coding systems may require some parsing.