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Asked: 2026-05-14T17:02:26+00:00

I am trying to use doxygen to generate documentation for some matlab classes I

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I am trying to use doxygen to generate documentation for some matlab classes I have written. I am using the doxygen-matlab package, which includes a perl script to kludge matlab .m files into c++ style commented files, so that doxygen can read them.

In my doxyfile, I have set (according to the instructions)

FILTER_PATTERNS        = *m=C:/doxygenMatlab/m2cpp.pl

However, when the code runs, rather than running the script on the input files, it appears to just open the script using whatever the default windows setting for .pl is.

IE, if I associate .pl with notepad, the script is opened by notepad once for each input file doxygen is trying to parse. If I associate .pl with perl.exe, the script runs and throws the no argument error

Argument must contain filename -1 at C:\doxygenMatlab\m2cpp.pl line 4.

The doxygen documentation says 

Doxygen will invoke the filter program by executing (via popen()) the command <filter> <input-file>

So I am wondering if there is some problem with popen() and windows that I could fix.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I tried to reproduce the error using the Windows command prompt (“cmd”) and noticed the following:

    • If you call “perl m2cpp.pl” you get error -1 because you did not specify a m-file to be translated into a cpp-file.
    • If you call “perl m2cpp.pl mfile” and the path of mfile contains spaces, you get error 1.
    • After I moved the mfile into a location which does not contain spaces, I got the desired output.

    Now back to Doxygen. I tried what you suggested, Fabrice, without any luck. I read the doxygen help and found out that the INPUT_FILTER variable is only read and used if FILTER_PATTERNS is empty.

    Therefore, I now use INPUT_FILTER = “C:\Programme\MATLAB\R2009a\sys\perl\win32\bin\perl U:\doxygen_matlab\m2cpp.pl” and an empty FILTER_PATTERNS variable. With this configuration, you can even leave the PERL_PATH variable empty. Moreover, there seems to be no issues with file names that contain spaces.

    Unfortunately, all files are parsed with the above configuration, not only m-files. However, setting FILTER_PATTERNS to something like *.m=C:\Programme\MATLAB\R2009a\sys\perl\win32\bin\perl U:\doxygen_matlab\m2cpp.pl does not work because doxygen automatically adds the name of the filtered mfile and interprets the command as perl “m2cpp.pl mfile”. Of course, the file “m2cpp.pl mfile” does not exist, because these are two files.

    Maybe you can find a solution to this problem. In the meantime, I suggest the workaround above and that you keep your C-files away from the folder that contains the m-files.

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