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Prepare HTML for Conversion to DOM Objects

This example shows how to prepare HTML content before converting it to the MATLAB® Report Generator™ internal document object model (DOM). The example creates a CSS style sheet and an HTML file that uses the style sheet. The example uses the mlreportgen.utils.html2dom.prepHTMLFile function to prepare the HTML file content so that it can be converted to an mlreportgen.dom.HTMLFile object. The function tidies the HTML and converts the HTML to markup that is supported by an mlreportgen.dom.HTMLFile object. See Prepare HTML Before Conversion. To prepare HTML content that is in a string, use mlreportgen.utils.html2dom.prepHTMLString.

Create a CSS style sheet, myCSS.css, to specify that the text in a paragraph is red.

p {
    color: red;
  }

Create a file, myHTML.html, that contains this HTML:

<html>
<head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="myCSS.css" >
</head>
<body>
    <p> Hello World</p>
</body>
</html>

The HTML cannot be used by a MATLAB Report Generator DOM HTMLFile object because the link element is not properly closed. The slash (/) before the closing angle bracket (>) is missing.

Try to convert the HTML to an mlreportgen.dom.HTMLFile object. 

import mlreportgen.dom.*
d = Document('test','pdf');
htmlObj = HTMLFile('myHTML.html');
append(d,htmlObj);
close(d);
rptview(d);
Error using mlreportgen.dom.HTMLFile
HTML error: expected end of tag 'link'

Tidy the HTML by using mlreportgen.utils.tidy. This function does not format the HTML elements using the formatting in the style sheet.

import mlreportgen.dom.*
import mlreportgen.utils.*
d = Document('test','pdf');
tidy('myHTML.html');
htmlObj = HTMLFile('myHTML-tidied.html');
append(d,htmlObj);
close(d);
rptview(d);

In the generated report, the text is black, not red.

"Hello World", in black

Use mlreportgen.utils.html2dom.prepHTMLFile to tidy the HTML and format the HTML elements according to the style sheet. 

import mlreportgen.dom.*
import mlreportgen.utils.html2dom.*
d = Document('test','pdf');
preppedHTMLFile = prepHTMLFile('myHTML.html','mypreppedHTML.html');
htmlObj = HTMLFile(preppedHTMLFile);
append(d,htmlObj);
close(d);
rptview(d);

In the generated report, the text is red.

"Hello World", in red.

Note

In the process of preparing HTML, the mlreportgen.utils.html2dom.prepHTMLFile and mlreportgen.utils.html2dom.prepHTMLString functions load the HTML in a MATLAB web browser. See Prepare HTML Before Conversion. Formatting that is not specified in the input HTML or style sheet is determined by the browser. The input HTML in this example does not specify the font family. Therefore, the font family is determined by the browser. To render the text with a different font, you can specify the font in the input style sheet or HTML before preparing the HTML conversion or use the report generation formatting capabilities. See Report Formatting Approaches.

See Also

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