Abstract: To encode hierarchial information the invention recognizes that there is implicit information which must be made explicit. Thus the hierarchial information is annotated by selectively adding to it two spatial representing characters, each instance of a first spatial representing character corresponds to a unit step to the right, each instance of a second spatial representing character represents a unit identation to the left, and the first instance of the second spatial representing character in a string of the second spatial representing characters also represents a carriage return and line feed. The annotated hierarchial information is then scanned to produce two byproduct strings. The first byproduct string is merely the sequence of first and second spatial representing characters, in the order in which they appear, to which is added two place holding characters, one representing an alpha-numeric string, and the second representing a string of one or more blank or null characters.