[xsl] request: flattening or normalising tables with spanned cells

["Trevor Nicholls trevor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(note: I'm looking for an XSL2 solution at this point.)

I'm trying to convert certain XML documents to markdown [for reasons :-( 
] and one of my issues is that the XML contains tables with arbitrary 
numbers of rows and columns (the column count is not supplied in an 
attribute), and some of these tables contain cells/td elements with 
rowspan or colspan (or both). Markdown tables of course do not support 
either row or column spanning.

The approach I have chosen is to reprocess the tables so that spanned 
cells are replaced with repeated cells, either empty or replications of 
the original. I think I can see how to engineer this for colspans but 
rowspans are a whole other story.

Has anybody done something similar and can give me some hints how to 
achieve this?

And would it be better to refactor the tables in a separate pass before 
doing the markdown transformation or is it possible to achieve this 
using variables?

TIA

Trevor