Reading HTML file in Matlab as 'continuous' text

Question

I've been reading in HTML files in Matlab with readfile, with the interest of using regexp to extract data from it. The function is returning the data the file as a string, which preserves the 'structure' of the HTML file, for example newlines. For example, if you try to do a file read on a file with the below contents it will return a string with the same structure.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML>
   <HEAD>
      <TITLE>
     A Small Hello
      </TITLE>
   </HEAD>
</HTML>

I'm looking for a function that will return a continuous string like ...

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> A Small Hello </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1>Hi</H1> <P>This is very minimal "hello world" HTML document.</P> </BODY> </HTML>

This format will assist in my regexp endeavours.

Many thanks, Bob M

[Do not use regular expressions to parse HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454), use a proper HTML parser instead. — You, Jul 11 '11 at 14:20

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 11 '11 at 14:10

1

Regular expressions can do that:

str = fileread('file.html');
str = regexprep(str,'\s*',' ');   %# replace multiple whitespaces with a space

answered Jul 11 '11 at 14:10

Amro

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Thanks, this worked perfectly. I'm using `regexprep` more and more often. – Bob M. Jul 11 '11 at 14:25

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 11 '11 at 14:11

A quick way to jam these things together might be to import the data then concatenate them using strcat.

The code

imported_string = importdata(filename)
imported_string_together = strcat(imported_string{:})

produces the following output

imported_string = 

    '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">'
    '<HTML>'
    '   <HEAD>'
    '      <TITLE>'
    '     A Small Hello'
    '      </TITLE>'
    '   </HEAD>'
    '</HTML>'


imported_string_together =

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"><HTML>   <HEAD>      <TITLE>     A Small Hello      </TITLE>   </HEAD></HTML>

but this isn't really efficient.

I find that it is sometimes useful to go back to fopen/fread/fscanf type functions to quickly load things in a predictable manner. For example, you can use the following code to create what you want without so much copying and and other nonsense:

filename = 'test.html';
maxReadSize = 2^10;

fid = fopen(filename);
mystr = fscanf(fid, '%c', maxReadSize)

to produce the following output:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"><HTML>   <HEAD>      <TITLE>     A Small Hello      </TITLE>   </HEAD></HTML>
</HTML>

Thanks Steve, this works great. I found the `regexprep` a little better for my particular problem when there is problematic whitespace in the mix too. — Bob M., Jul 11 '11 at 14:27

Reading HTML file in Matlab as 'continuous' text

2 Answers2