METHOD FOR ENCODING AND DECODING A PATH IN THE TREE STRUCTURE OF A STRUCTURED DOCUMENT

摘要

The invention relates to a method for encoding and decoding a path that is applied to the hierarchical structure of a structured document, in which a path is defined by a series of segments that connect an originating node to a destination node. Each node represents a document information element which is associated with at least one type of information. The inventive method comprises: a preliminary stage whereby each node in the structure is assigned a list of pairs comprising a name and a type of information element, represented by all the nodes likely to be directly attached to the node, and whereby a respective binary code is allocated to each name/type pair; and a path encoding stage whereby the binary node code that represents the name/type pair of the destination node of the segment is determined (21, 22) for each segment of the path to be encoded, and (23) said code is subsequently inserted in the path code.