HTML Style Splitter  HTML Style Splitter

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This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project.

This project outline is not like the artificial tidy problems you are spoon-fed in school, when all the facts you need are included, nothing extraneous is mentioned, the answer is fully specified, along with hints to nudge you toward a single expected canonical solution. This project is much more like the real world of messy problems where it is up to you to fully the define the end point, or a series of ever more difficult versions of this project, and research the information yourself to solve them.

Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; or give you any additional materials. I have too many other projects of my own.

Though I am a programmer, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project in any way you please and to keep all the profits from your endeavor.

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

Let us say that in your original css HTML style marking you had a plant style for marking the names of plants and an animal style for marking the names of animals. You then decided that you wanted to break up the animal style more finely into invertebrate and vertebrate styles.

You could go through manually correcting all the animal styles. Instead you run the proposed style splitter utility that finds all uses of the animal style and plant styles and extracts the contents of each span, sorts, eliminates duplicates and presents them to you. Using an editor or mouse you divide the entries into three groups, the plant, the vertebrate and invertebrate. By your rearranging, you create a file that looks like this;

[vertebrate]
animal dog
animal cat
animal kat

[invertebrate]
animal snail
plant sea slug

[plant]
animal Venus Fly Trap
plant seaweed
plant strawberry

This simultaneously describes your new catogorising system and corrects the errors in the old one, e.g <span class="animal">Venus fly trap</span> and <span class="plant">sea slug</span>

You then run you utility over the *.html files to make the required changes.

Note this utility would not correct the kat spelling. You might want to invent a spell corrector that works in a similar way on the content of the styles rather than their names, correcting or changing terminology only in the context of a particular style. You would see a list of all the variant spellings and you would move them after the correct one for bulk correction, and perhaps for autocorrection in futture.

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