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:

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

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