Learn English – Word to mean ‘seek through, one element at a time’

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I'm looking for a word to describe the process that a computer program performs when

searching through a dataset bit by bit.

I had believed the word parse ('to parse through the data') was correct. However, it seems that the word parse actually means 'to split into pieces'.

I'm thinking of something along the lines of trawl, seek, step through etc. I just wonder if there is a more elegant word/phrase that I could use.

Best Answer

Iterate is the word that's generally used for this, I believe:

The program iterates through the collection, searching for every occurrence of the target value.

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