custom class documentation question

If I build a class in Matlab and type doc(class_name) the documentation comes up with information on the properties, methods, etc. of that class, somehow automatically generated from the .m code file itself. Is there a way to capture this in an .html file or a .m file that could be published into .html using publish()? With the help() command you can specify an output argument to capture the help as a character array (then fprintf() into a .m file and publish() it), but with doc() you cannot do this.

[mcg]

Well I at least figured out what Matlab is doing, to a point. Debug stepping through doc() it eventually gets the html with this command:

html = help2html(topic,'','-doc');

I can simply write this html to a text file, and it displays in Help or a web browser okay but the format is messed up, not pretty like what doc() spits out. If you continue passed this where the html string is created, it goes through a bunch of mumbo jumbo, pre-pending a 'text://' string to the html string, and finally gets to a nested function

doc() >> showHelpwin() >> helpwin() >> displayFile() >> web() >> openMatlabBrowser()

Inside of this function it calls

com.mathworks.mlservices.MLHelpServices.setHtmlText(html_file(8:end));

which is where the magic happens. But you can't step into this function, and you can't get an output from it. I think inside of here the html is being massaged to look nice, but I still don't see a way to capture the result. I can't even right click and "Get Page Source" because the result is blank.

[Daniel Dolan]

com.mathworks.mlservices.MLHelpServices.setHtmlText is a static Java method.

Answer 1

[Daniel Dolan]

You might take a look at the help2html function, located in the same directory as the doc function. It is an unsupported file and gould change at any time, so be wary.