XTRAN Example — Analyze HTML Tag & Attribute Usage

XTRAN treats HTML as a computer language, in which each tag, line or segment of nonmarkup text, or end tag is a "statement", and each tag attribute is a "statement attribute".

The following example uses an XTRAN rules file comprising 102 non-comment lines of XTRAN's rules language ("meta-code") to analyze and tally all tags and attributes used in HTML.

The HTML mining rules for this example can easily be enhanced to produce DSV output that can be interactively queried using existing XTRAN rules.

The following is an English paraphrase of the XTRAN rules used for this example.

    For each HTML tag occurrence
        Tally tag occurrence
        For each of tag's attributes if any
            Tally attribute occurrence for tag
    Sort tags
    For each HTML tag seen, alphabetically
        Report tag tally
        Sort attributes for tag
        For each attribute seen for this tag, alphabetically
            Report attribute tally

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Process Flowchart

Here is a flowchart for this process, in which the elements are color coded:

• BLUE for XTRAN versions (runnable programs)
• ORANGE for XTRAN rules (text files)
• RED for code
• PURPLE for text data files

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Output from XTRAN:

Running these rules on this HTML page generated the following XTRAN analysis output:

                          HTML Tag and Attribute Usage

!DOCTYPE            1
A                   5
    HREF        5
B                   11
BODY                1
    LINK        1
    VLINK       1
BR                  10
FONT                2
    COLOR       1
    FACE        2
    SIZE        2
H3                  1
HEAD                1
HR                  2
    SIZE        2
HTML                1
IMG                 2
    ALT         2
    BORDER      1
    HEIGHT      2
    SRC         2
    WIDTH       2
META                3
    CONTENT     3
    HTTP-EQUIV  1
    NAME        2
P                   7
    ALIGN       1
PRE                 2
TITLE               1