Compaction

Analysis of STxT information

A document is just a set of nodes with a certain indentation, so the information is really about order and level.

Let's see it in an example:

Node_0 (com.example.docs):
	Node_1:
		Node_2: Node2 Text
		Node_3: Node3 Text
	Node_4:
		Node_5: Node5 Text
		Node_6: Node6 Text
			Continuation text
			Another line of text
		Node_7:
			Node_8:
				Node_9: Last line

We see that there are 10 Nodes in this document. The first node is Node_0, and it contains the others. We could say it is the first to appear (order) and has level 0 (it is not indented and contains the others). The second node is Node_1. It is the second to appear and has level 1. In this way we could qualify all the lines, and extract the information. It is not difficult to make a table with this information:

Now it's just a matter of including this information. This is what the next section is about.

A form of compaction

From the previous table, let's propose a way to compact the information. It will be as simple as inserting the level number instead of using tabs, and separating it with the usual character ':'.

So, the previous example would look like:

0:Node_0 (com.example.docs):
1:Node_1:
2:Node_2: Node2 Text
3:Node_3: Node3 Text
1:Node_4:
2:Node_5: Node5 Text
2:Node_6: Node6 Text
3:Continuation text
3:Another line of text
2:Node_7:
3:Node_8:
4:Node_9: Last line

Really, the rule for compacting is this simple:

The usefulness of compaction is to create a slightly more efficient format, which is still easy for humans to read and write. With the level numbers it is also very easy to read, and for machines it has some advantages:

• The file size is usually smaller.
• Parsing the file is faster, since there is no need to calculate the level through tabs (or spaces).