Removing rowspan from a table

I had written a data mining (scraping) script to obtain data from a table and it was working - until the table started having rowspan entries in it. I decided the easiest way to continue was to write a script to replace the rowspan entries with the requisite number of simple entries.

Here is the rowspan replacement script I used (it is written in Javascript and uses jQuery)
The reverse() bit is needed to preserve order - the script uses prepend to insert new elements so we have to start with the last element that needs work and finish with the first.

function replace_rowspan(section){
 $.fn.reverse = [].reverse; //http://forum.jquery.com/topic/jquery-reverse-a-collection-of-jquery-elements
 //script to process an array containing rowspan and re-write it without rowspan by putting in all the repeats
 while($(section).find("td[rowspan]").length>0){ //are there any rowspans left
  $(section).find("tr>td[rowspan]:first").each(function(i,tdi){ //find a row with a rowspan
   var the_row=$(tdi).parents("tr");
   $(the_row).find("td[rowspan]").reverse().each(function(j,tdj){
    var c=$(tdj).clone();
    var rs=$(tdj).attr("rowspan")-1;
    var v=$(tdj).text();            
    $(tdj).removeAttr("rowspan");
    if(rs>=2) //if the rowspan left is 2 or more, then leave the rowspan attribute in and let it be processed next time round
     $(the_row).next().prepend($(c).attr("rowspan",rs).addClass("green") );
    else if(rs==1) // otherwise this will be the last new entry and the rowspan attribute can be removed
     $(the_row).next().prepend($(c).removeAttr("rowspan").addClass("red") );
   })
  })
 }
}