File Exchange Pick of the Week

Jiro's pick this week is DataTable by Paul.

MATLAB stands for MATrix LABoratory. So it's no surprise that we work with a lot of matrices. From time to time, I've wanted to embed a matrix in a Wiki page or an HTML document. The problem is that it's a tedious process to create the appropriate markup, and it doesn't scale well for large matrices.

Paul's DataTable class makes this extremely simple. Just create your matrix like a cell array, and convert it to the appropriate markup with a single command. In addition, he uses the new MATLAB Classes (introduced in R2008a) to implement his class.

Let's take a look at an example. Oh, and here is some personal info about us.

table         = DataTable();
table{2:4, 1} = {'Bob'; 'Brett'; 'Jiro'};
table{1, 2:5} = {'Occupation', ...
  'MathWorker since...', ...
  'FEX submissions', ...
  'POTW posts'};
table{2, 2:5} = {'Quality Engineer', 'July 2001', 24, 25};
table{3, 2:5} = {'Application Engineer', 'Dec 2005', 47, 27};
table{4, 2:5} = {'Application Engineer', 'May 2006', 32, 23};

% Center-align the text
table.setColumnTextAlignment(1:5, 'c')

table.toText();

|       |      Occupation      | MathWorker since... | FEX submissions | POTW posts |
|  Bob  |   Quality Engineer   |      July 2001      |       24        |     25     |
| Brett | Application Engineer |      Dec 2005       |       47        |     27     |
| Jiro  | Application Engineer |      May 2006       |       32        |     23     |

For HTML printing, simply call the toHTML method. You can even add table attributes!

table.toHTML('tableattributes', 'bgcolor="#ffcc00"');

<table bgcolor="#ffcc00">
<tr>
  <td align="center"></td>
  <td align="center">Occupation</td>
  <td align="center">MathWorker since...</td>
  <td align="center">FEX submissions</td>
  <td align="center">POTW posts</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td align="center">Bob</td>
  <td align="center">Quality Engineer</td>
  <td align="center">July 2001</td>
  <td align="center">24</td>
  <td align="center">25</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td align="center">Brett</td>
  <td align="center">Application Engineer</td>
  <td align="center">Dec 2005</td>
  <td align="center">47</td>
  <td align="center">27</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td align="center">Jiro</td>
  <td align="center">Application Engineer</td>
  <td align="center">May 2006</td>
  <td align="center">32</td>
  <td align="center">23</td>
</tr>
</table>

The above HTML markup renders to the following table:

	Occupation	MathWorker since...	FEX submissions	POTW posts
Bob	Quality Engineer	July 2001	24	25
Brett	Application Engineer	Dec 2005	47	27
Jiro	Application Engineer	May 2006	32	23

Thanks for this very useful and well-written entry, Paul!

Comments?

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® 7.9

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