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Asked: 2026-05-23T18:30:42+00:00

I’ve been reading in HTML files in Matlab with readfile , with the interest

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I’ve been reading in HTML files in Matlab with readfile, with the interest of using regexp to extract data from it. The function is returning the data the file as a string, which preserves the ‘structure’ of the HTML file, for example newlines. For example, if you try to do a file read on a file with the below contents it will return a string with the same structure.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML>
   <HEAD>
      <TITLE>
     A Small Hello
      </TITLE>
   </HEAD>
</HTML>

I’m looking for a function that will return a continuous string like …

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
A Small Hello
</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Hi</H1>
<P>This is very minimal "hello world" HTML document.</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

This format will assist in my regexp endeavours.

Many thanks,
Bob M

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A quick way to jam these things together might be to import the data then concatenate them using strcat.

    The code

    imported_string = importdata(filename)
imported_string_together = strcat(imported_string{:})

    produces the following output

    imported_string = 

    '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">'
    '<HTML>'
    '   <HEAD>'
    '      <TITLE>'
    '     A Small Hello'
    '      </TITLE>'
    '   </HEAD>'
    '</HTML>'


imported_string_together =

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"><HTML>   <HEAD>      <TITLE>     A Small Hello      </TITLE>   </HEAD></HTML>

    but this isn’t really efficient.

    I find that it is sometimes useful to go back to fopen/fread/fscanf type functions to quickly load things in a predictable manner. For example, you can use the following code to create what you want without so much copying and and other nonsense:

    filename = 'test.html';
maxReadSize = 2^10;

fid = fopen(filename);
mystr = fscanf(fid, '%c', maxReadSize)

    to produce the following output:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"><HTML>   <HEAD>      <TITLE>     A Small Hello      </TITLE>   </HEAD></HTML>
</HTML>
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