textscan doesn't read the entire .m file

Hello everyone,

WHAT I want to do: Get all the lines of any given function (.m file) into a cellarray of strings. e.g. for the 'sum.m' file I want a cell that looks like...

[x] = magicFunction('sum.m')

x = {...

'%SUM Sum of elements.'...

'% S = SUM(X) is the sum of the elements of the vector X. If X is a matrix,'...

'% S is a row vector with the sum over each column. For N-D arrays, '...

'% SUM(X) operates along the first non-singleton dimension.'...

}

etc.

WHY I want to do it: I want to be able to store my function (I'm just using sum.m as an example) with the variables created from that function. This way any settings or tweaks I made on that run will be saved with the variable. This is important to me because I have to do a lot of trial and error when doing analysis (I study neural response properties) and I may forget what properties I set.

I run 10's of programs sometimes with 20 important settings I need to record. Sometimes changing one setting at a time and then running it. The number of combinations get big pretty fast.

the below code displays my problem. You can run it on your machine to see what I mean

funcName = 'sum.m';
fid=fopen(funcName);
 
C ={};
C2 = {};
for k = 1: 1000
    C{k, 1} = textscan(fid,'%s',1,'delimiter','\r', 'headerlines',k-1);
    C2{k, 1} = textscan(fid,'%s',1,'delimiter','\n', 'headerlines',k-1);
end
fclose(fid);
for k = 1:length(C)
    if ~isempty(C{k}{:})
        disp(k)
    end
    disp(C{k}{:});
end
fprintf('\n\n\n\n')
for k = 1:length(C2)
    if ~isempty(C2{k}{:})
        disp(k)
    end
    disp(C2{k}{:});
end
edit(funcName)

I think that the "%S" in the "%SUM" in the beginning of sum.m is likely screwing me up because it is a string command??

[Walter Roberson]

fileread() and splitlines()

[Phillip Maire]

wowwwwww!! thank you so much. I couldn't find this anywhere!!

I would like to accept this as my answer but it's just a comment so i don't know how.

[Stephen23]

"I run 10's of programs sometimes with 20 important settings I need to record."

It is not clear from your question how those "settings" relate to the function code. Why not just store the settings themselves?

[Phillip Maire]

Yeah so that’s what I do. But it gets really tedious because sometimes I add more variables or comment them out. So then I’ll have saved variables that don’t apply or maybe some I forget to save.

Also if I made any error in my code that is associated with my .mat data file (i.e. if I forgot to initialize a variable and my data looks weird) I can trace that back to the code used to create it.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

You can use fileread() and splitlines().

However due to old habits I am more likely to use regexp() with the 'split' option than I am to use splitlines ()

[Phillip Maire]

one more thing that is just aesthetic, when I use

if I have a function like below

function dummy1()
hey = 1
end

funcString = fileread(dummy1);
fprintf('%s', funcString)

produces

function dummy1()

hey = 1

end

with an extra line at every line. Any simple fix for this?

[Walter Roberson]

That does not happen for me.

I suspect your file is created in MS Windows with CR+LF line terminators.

funcString = fileread('dummy1.m');
funcString = regexprep(funcString, '\r', '');
fprintf('%s', funcString);

There are other ways of coding the deletion of the \r instead of regexrep(), such as

funcString(funcString == 13) = '';

[Phillip Maire]

that worked! thank you so much you are extremely helpful!

Answer 2

[Steven Lord]

Rather than trying to save the contents of your code files as variables, why not set up a source control system? That way you can check each version of your code into the system and go back to any previously checked-in version of the file? You could check in a MAT-file containing the results at the same time, so you'll have traceability and time consistency.

[Phillip Maire]

Yes this makes sense I use git hub for this. But it isn’t the same. There are no data associated with each version. I create .mat files and want the function used to create it stored with it.

To my best knowledge, source control systems don’t do that and aren’t designed to do that.

I appreciate your answer thank you