Introduction

In this help the acronym TETRA will be used sometimes as abbreviation of the

TextTransformer program. TETRA transforms text; it translates a source text into a target text.

However, what this means, can be explained best by examples.

The transformation can be simple replacements of words, for example the replacement of "TextTransformer" by "TETRA". In contrast to a normal text processing, by TETRA not only single pairs of words but also whole lists of such pairs can be processed at a stretch.

A little bit more advanced are rearrangements of words. So mailing lists, consisting of lines with name, address and phone number could be transformed to: phone number, name and address.

Another example is the extraction of data from a text. For example names and prices of certain products could be extracted from a catalog and arranged to a list.

Also it is possible, to apply certain actions on the extracted data, for example a calculation. Prices could be extracted from a bill and summed. In this case the transformation of text would be to build a single sum from a bill. At this example you can see, that the expression "transformation of text" should be understood in a very broad sense.

The previous examples were of quite easy nature. With some practice such transformation programs can be written in minutes. Who isn't practiced yet so much, will need some more time, but the time will pass very quickly, because the development of a TETRA program is a playful pleasure: eventual errors are signalized immediately and you can try everything just easy, piece by piece.

Its whole strength the TextTransformer shows, when dealing with complex grammars, as for example the translation of a programming language into a different.

Finally, TETRA can be used in a totally different way. Instead of analyzing texts with a predefined structure, you can develop just such a structure. By means of TETRA new programming languages can be created. For example the central parts of the TextTransformer are made by TETRA itself.

This page belongs to the TextTransformer Documentation