MATLAB Spoken Here

July 9th, 2007

I quite often get asked how to print out hyperlinks to the Command Window. It’s really easy! The Command Window accepts <a href tags that contain valid links. Valid links contain http:// or matlab:. The Command Window treats any text after the matlab: syntax, inside the quote marks, as executable M-code.

Here are some examples of hyperlinks in the Command Window.

Hyperlink to a web page

disp('This is a link to <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>.')

Hyperlink to M-code

disp('You should <a href="matlab: plot(magic(10)), disp(''I plotted some stuff'')">my code</a>!')

I used the disp command, but you could also use the fprintf command to achieve the same effect.

To open an m-file from the Command Window, disp a matlab: link that uses the function opentoline:

disp('You should <a href="matlab: opentoline(which(''why.m''),27)">open my file</a>!')

These lines of code can be placed in any M-file or in any shortcut on the Desktop toolbar.

The Command Window is not an HTML renderer, so it won’t interpret other types of html tags – just the <a href tag.

07:28 UTC | Posted in Command Window | Permalink | 30 Comments »

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30 Responses to “Printing hyperlinks to the Command Window”

1. Y Sylman replied on July 9th, 2007 at 09:17 UTC :
   

   Hi Kristin,
   Try “help matlabcolon” …

2. Kelly replied on July 11th, 2007 at 12:20 UTC :
   

   Actually, I’ve more often wondered how to prevent printing hyperlinks to the command window. I was working on a project a few weeks ago that involved parsing a page of html commands. At one point I was printing some info to the command window for debugging purposes, and was being driven crazy by the automatic rendering of some of the html links. Is there a way to suppress this?

3. Kristin replied on July 11th, 2007 at 12:26 UTC :
   

   Kelly – What would you like it to do instead? Are you accidentally clicking on them? Do you want to see the html or do you just not want to see the underlines?

4. Kelly replied on July 12th, 2007 at 09:59 UTC :
   

   I wanted to see the plain text html. As I said, it was a minor inconvenience, since I could just open the files in a text editor instead. But I was surprised to discover there was no way to disable this behavior.

5. Tim Davis replied on August 22nd, 2007 at 17:55 UTC :
   

   This is cool! What I really want to do is to use color to highlight certain values that I print out, so I can now gleefully abuse this feature to do just that. For example:

   x = rand (10,1) ;
   for k = 1:10
   if (x (k) %8.5f\n’, x (k)) ;
   end
   end

   prints out x, but it underlines in blue the values that are greater than or equal to 0.5, with an otherwise-useless HTML link.

   Fun! … just don’t click on those funny blue numbers …

6. Tim Davis replied on August 22nd, 2007 at 17:59 UTC :
   

   Oh … I got caught again because the blog-comment post tries to interpret “less than …” as an html tag and it destroyed my code … Let me try again with “pre” tags …

   x = rand (10,1) ;
   for k = 1:10
   if (x (k) %8.5f\n’, x (k)) ;
   end
   end

7. Tim Davis replied on August 22nd, 2007 at 18:00 UTC :
   

   sigh … replace _LT_ and _GT_ below with the less than and greater than signs respectively…

   x = rand (10,1) ;
   for k = 1:10
   if (x (k) _LT_ .5)
   fprintf (‘%8.5f\n’, x (k)) ;
   else
   fprintf (‘_LT_ href=”"_GT_%8.5f_LT_/a_GT_\n’, x (k)) ;
   end
   end

8. Tim Davis replied on August 23rd, 2007 at 06:49 UTC :
   

   You can disable the highlighting of hypertext links by just replacing the href= string with HREF=. See hprintf.m, which I just posted in the File Exchange. Note that for “disp” you would need another solution:

   Instead of disp(string_with_url) you would use

   disp (strrep (string_with_url, ‘href=’, ‘HREF=’)) ;

   Failing that, you could always use matlab -nodesktop and turn off everything … :-}

9. Tim Davis replied on August 23rd, 2007 at 07:23 UTC :
   

   Note that HREF= is recognized by regular web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and even the MATLAB built-in “web”), so changing href= to HREF= disables only the hypertext link in the MATLAB Command Window, but leaves it as a valid link everywhere else.

10. Kristin replied on August 23rd, 2007 at 07:25 UTC :
    

    Hey Tim,

    In your example above, you could link the variables to disp the values, then if you click on them you are at least getting useful info.

    x = rand (10,1) ;
    for k = 1:10
      if (x (k) %lt; .5)
        fprintf (‘%8.5f\n’, x (k)) ;
      else
        fprintf (‘<a href=”matlab: disp %s”>%8.5f</a>\n’, x (k), x(k)) ;
      end
    end

    Obviously, this would work better if you were printing something other than the values.

11. Tim Davis replied on August 23rd, 2007 at 11:20 UTC :
    

    I was just printing values, and needed a do-nothing link, then “matlab:why” is the coolest do-nothing function out there :-)

12. Yuri replied on October 21st, 2008 at 09:15 UTC :
    

    Tim, Kristin,

    Isn’t there another way to change the text color in the command window?

    Obviously, Tim’s solution is not powerful.

    Yuri

13. Mike replied on October 21st, 2008 at 12:00 UTC :
    

    Yuri,

    It is not possible to change the text color in the Command Window. You can get errors or hyperlinks (whose color is settable in the preferences) but these have additional semantics that are not desirable for other uses.

14. Rick Candell replied on January 1st, 2009 at 04:19 UTC :
    

    It is very desirable to be able to print colored text to the command window. Why has this feature not yet been implemented? It would also be nice in a matlab notebook, but I found the notebook to be very flakey. I would prefer to have color text in the command window.

15. Mike replied on January 19th, 2009 at 00:58 UTC :
    

    Rick,

    Thank you for the suggestion. If you have a specific use case in mind, feel free to email us with the details.

    Mike

16. Jimmy replied on November 3rd, 2009 at 20:41 UTC :
    

    Is there any way to include hyperlinks in a comment, such as the standard help at the beginning of a function?

17. Yair Altman replied on November 3rd, 2009 at 23:08 UTC :
    

    Jimmy – if you mean that you wish to include hyperlinks in your function’s help comment, that will display asa hyperlink in the Command Window when you type “help myfunc”, then yes – simply include the hyperlink in your help comment, like so:

    function result = myfunc(varargin)
    % MYFUNC – this function does A B C …
    %
    % See also: <a href=”http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors/27420″>MathWorks File Exchange</a>
    %

    Yair

18. Mike replied on November 4th, 2009 at 12:52 UTC :
    

    Thanks for fielding that one, Yair.

19. jeephenry replied on August 24th, 2010 at 06:17 UTC :
    

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20. Nic replied on December 14th, 2010 at 11:37 UTC :
    

    I’m using the hyperlink command to access windows explorer:

    disp('Go to data directory')
    

    This works nicely but Matlab is ‘busy’ until the explorer window is closed. Does anyone know a way around this?

21. Nic replied on December 14th, 2010 at 11:39 UTC :
    

    Might be easier if you can see the code:

    disp(‘Go to data directory‘)

22. Nic replied on December 14th, 2010 at 11:57 UTC :
    

    One more time…

    disp(‘<a href=”matlab:winExplorer(”c:\”)”>Go to directory</a>’)

23. Nic replied on December 14th, 2010 at 12:13 UTC :
    

    Apologies for this – I have found a solution but the issue was with my own function.

    In case someone is interested – here is a piece of code that creates a hyperlink to open windows explorer to a particular folder, in this case the c drive:

    disp(‘<a href=”matlab:dos(”explorer.exe /e, c:\, &”)”>Go to data directory</a>’)

    note: including ‘&’ in the dos command input, returns to matlab immediately and the busy state is not an issue.

24. jiro replied on December 14th, 2010 at 12:36 UTC :
    

    @Nic,

    You should be able to do this:

    disp('<a href="matlab:winopen(''C:\'')">Go to data directory</a>')

25. Nic replied on December 14th, 2010 at 17:01 UTC :
    

    Thanks jiro – so many bits and pieces to learn!

26. AdrianC replied on February 28th, 2011 at 22:35 UTC :
    

    Hi,
    After I create a hyperlink, I want to be able to click on the link automatically so I dont have to do it manually. The link will be to an image from an IP camera, and ideally I would like to save the resulting image. My aim is to write software that records jpegs from an IP camera at X frames per second. Has anyone done something like this?
    Thanks,
    Adrian

27. Daniel Armyr replied on June 20th, 2011 at 09:33 UTC :
    

    Hi.
    I found this blog post a few months ago and started using this trick in several functions where one might want to quickly find the piece of code that printed the output.

    Now that I upgraded to Matlab 2011a, the code does not work any more.

    This code:

    disp('You should &lta href="matlab: opentoline(which(''why.m''),27)">open my file&lt/a>!')

    Gives me the following message:
    “File c:\…\which(‘why.m’) does not exist. [...]“

    Indicating that the contents of the first parentesis are taken as a literal string and are not evaluated as Matlab code. Does anyone have a workaround, because the hyperlink thing was really useful.

28. Daniel Armyr replied on June 20th, 2011 at 12:28 UTC :
    

    Oh.
    Just found the answer in a much newer post: Replacing the above line with

    disp('You should <a href="matlab:matlab.desktop.editor.openAndGoToLine(which(''why.m''),27)">open my file</a>!')

29. Chris replied on July 8th, 2011 at 16:17 UTC :
    

    I am trying to use the matlabcolon methodology described above to display hyperlinks to the command window, where my HYPERLINK_TEXT is not constant string, but rather changes dynamically in a FOR loop. This is because I want to print out hyperlinks for a number of data files dynamically. So far I have not been able to do this. Is this possible?

30. Mike replied on July 11th, 2011 at 14:17 UTC :
    

    Chris,

    You just need to put the interesting text in the link, using (s/f)printf or using array concatenation in disp.

    E.g.

    for i=1:3
        fprintf('This is a link #%i <a href="http://www.google.com/#q=number%i" rel="nofollow">Google for %i</a>.\n',i,i,i)
    end
    

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<pre class="code">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>

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