URL READ and URL WRITE ERROR
1 view (last 30 days)
Show older comments
Hi
I want to copy and paste the contents of web page into a file, but using urlread or urlwrite, I get the HTML code for the webpage, instead I want to store the text content on that webpage to be stored in a text file or string array.
5 Comments
Walter Roberson
on 9 Jun 2013
urlread() and urlwrite() are doing their intended purpose, fetching the page as-is. Processing the page afterwards is the responsibility of your code.
Do you blame your automobile for the fact that when you go grocery shopping, the automobile does not bring the groceries into the kitchen and take them out of the grocery bags?
Answers (1)
Walter Roberson
on 7 Jun 2013
You will have to parse the text. The page you referenced before does not have the text presented in any simple way. Individual letters of the text are each surrounded <font> controls that select the color for the letters.
3 Comments
Walter Roberson
on 7 Jun 2013
Any of the standard techniques, including:
- fread() a character at a time and have a bunch of ad-hoc code to figure out what to do with it
- fread() a character at a time and use it to trigger a transition in a carefully constructed state machine
- fgets() or fgetl() a line at a time and use basic string manipulation techniques such as find() or strfind() or ismember() or switch/case
- fileread() or textscan() or fread() the entire file and use the basic techniques on the file that is now completely in memory
- Use regexp() or regexprep() to process the file that is completely in memory
- make a call to perl() with a perl script to do the work, perhaps having loaded in an HTML stripping routine from CPAN.org
- On Linux or OS-X machines, shell out to ed or sed or nawk to do the work
- write a C program to do the work
- write a lex grammar to do the tokenizing. Write a yacc routine to express the BNF and take appropriate actions
- http://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2010/08/20/get-html-table-data-into-matlab/
- find some Java library that does for HTML roughly what is done for xml in http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/44811
and so on.
See Also
Categories
Find more on String Parsing in Help Center and File Exchange
Community Treasure Hunt
Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!
Start Hunting!