International Business Machines Corporation
Intelligent normalization and de-normalization of tables for multiple processing scenarios

Abstract:

A method, system and computer-usable medium are disclosed for finding vertically and horizontally aligned cells in a complex table structure. A file or document, such as an HTML file that defines a complex table includes spanning rows and columns is expanded into a two dimensional (2D) array or table with orthogonal rows and columns, where the spanning rows and columns included cells with copied values or object references. The expanded 2D array or table can be deduplicated row or column wise to determine header alignment of the table.