The Universal Parsing Agent (UPA) is a software application tool that provides the capability to process text documents, extract information, and store that information in an XML markup file for further use by a database or other software products, The tool is unique because it takes advantage of a documents inherent structure to identify it and break it down and extract, by parsing, important information out of it independent of understanding a language. The UPA tool looks at patterns and symbols rather than the meaning. All that is needed are pattern descriptions in the appropriate character set. The benefit of the UPA tool is that it allows multiple document types to be parsed into a single common format to enable later investigation and manipulation of the data.