Question

I’m short on time and specifically wanted to extract a string like the one below. Problem is the tag isn’t of the form <a> data </a>.

Given,

s = <em style="font-size:medium"> 5,888 </em>

how to extract out just 5,888 in matlab?

Answer 1

Thanks folks for your help. I’m basically trying to get the population of a US county on Matlab. Thought I’l share my code, though not the most elegant. Might help some soul. 🙂

county = 'morris';
state = 'ks';

county = strrep(county, ' ' , '+');
str = sprintf('https://www.google.com/search?&q=population+%s+%s',county,state);
s = urlread(str);
pop = regexp(s,'<em[^>]*>(.*?)</em>', 'tokens');
pop = char(pop{:});
pop = strrep(pop, ',' , '');
pop = str2num(pop);