HTML tables

Posted by Robert Bemis, October 10, 2008

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Bob's pick this week is a three pack.

Display data as an HTML table by Gus Brown
Printing Variables to HTML Tables in Published Code by Ned Gulley
Generate HTML Table with thumbnails from jpg images by Theodoros Giannakopoulos

My work increasingly invloves generating web content for sharing with others. This very post was published from MATLAB which relies on HTML! So any clever use of mark-ups to make information more reader friendly is bound to get my attention. Gus's submission is a great example. Not only can it tabulate data it can color it too. That's not all. I can use it directly within my MATLAB work flow. To illustrate I'll build on an earlier pick, readtext. Here's some data: a cell array containing mixed numeric and text values.

data = readtext('SampleData.csv', '(?m)^''|'',''|''(?m)$');
data(:,1) = []

data = 
    'James Murphy'     [471]
    'John Doe, Jr.'    [ 44]
    'Bill O'Brien'     [127]

Tabulate the data.

disp <html>
disp(GTHTMLtable(data,{'Group member','Posts'}))
disp </html>

Group member	Posts
James Murphy	471	John Doe, Jr.	44	Bill O'Brien	127

Gus's command line help is novel. The "try it" callbacks for his examples was a nice touch. His calling syntax offers a lot of flexibility. While it's not exactly in line with how we design functions at The MathWorks, I must say the usability felt good. I found his 'show' option, particularly command line friendly. Moving on to others, search the File Exchange for "html table" and you'll get several hits. I've singled out two more favorites. Ned's submission includes some wonderful use cases. I really like Theodoros' thumbnails as well. Comments? Do you publish web pages to share your MATLAB work? How do you use HTML? Tell us about it here.

Published with MATLAB® 7.7