Eliot,
I can’t answer with specifics as I’m far from my codebase and will be for a
couple of weeks, but I did some investigation on checking CALS row/column span
interferences with XSLT3 a couple of years ago. One promising technique IIRC
was to use one or more array-valued accumulators to track the ‘wave front’ of
cell occupancies across the definitional tree. Try thinking along those lines.
John
Sent from my iPad
On 23 Jan 2020, at 15:30, Eliot Kimber ekimber(_at_)contrext(_dot_)com
<xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
I have XSLT 1-style code that converts HTML tables to CALS tables. I
discovered that this code fails for certain patterns of HTML tables in that
it miscalculates column spans in the face of row spans earlier in the table.
It doesn't fail for all tables, just specific ones (which is why we didn't
notice this bug earlier). I haven't been able to determine the cause of the
bug in the short time I've had to debug it (found the bug in the course of
trying to prepare a rush publishing job that has about 50 complex tables in
it, of course).
Rather than try to debug and fix the XSLT 1 solution it seemed easier and
better to re-implement the processing using XSLT 3 and I took a stab at doing
it using arrays last night, but quickly got bogged down in my own lack of
facility with such things. The procedural solution in i.e., Java, would be
easy: just populate the 2x2 matrix that represents the table grid to reflect
row and column spans as you process the table cells left-to-right and top to
bottom, using cells projected from earlier rows to determine the starting
column of cells in subsequent rows that get pushed over by row-spanning cells.
However, I couldn't quickly see how to do this using arrays or maps in XSLT
3--the immutability of arrays and thus the coding patterns that take existing
arrays or maps and return new ones threw me and my feeble brain just wasn't
landing on the right algorithmic pattern.
I know there must be a general pattern for this type of processing but none
of the examples I could find were helpful.
So my request: can someone help me with this challenge and outline how to
solve this kind of problem where you take as input an HTML table where any
cell may span two or more columns and two or more rows and produce a 2x2
array representing the table's grid, where every grid cell reflects the HTML
table cell that covers it.
From that array it's then easy to determine what the CALS result should be
(where CALS represents column spans by naming the start and end columns the
cell spans).
Thanks,
Eliot
--
Eliot Kimber
http://contrext.com
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