Does MATLAB have functionality similar to Mathematica's Import function to import html tables?

I'm trying to do in MATLAB the work that I previously did in Mathematica using its Import function to query a website, discover the available data elements and then grab whatever I needed. Mathematica's Import functionality includes what MATLAB's webread() does. For example, the MATLAB command

> data=webread("http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/XrayMassCoef/ElemTab/z29.html")

does what Mathematica does using

In[1]:= Import["http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/XrayMassCoef/ElemTab/z29.html", "Source"]

But with Mathematica I can also discover the available HTML elements:

In[2]:= Import["http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/XrayMassCoef/ElemTab/z29.html", "Elements"]

Out[2]= {"Data", "FullData", "Hyperlinks", "ImageLinks", "Images", "Plaintext", "Source", "Title", "XMLObject"}

I have attached a pdf file in which I use Mathematica's Import to obtain the HTML elements listed previously. For example, to grab the table data in a format that is ready for use (i.e. with the HTML structure removed), I can do this:

In[3]:= Import["http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/XrayMassCoef/ElemTab/z29.html","Data"][[1]]

Out[16]= {" Copper Z = 29 HTML table format", {"Energy", "\[Mu] / \[Rho]", "\[Mu] en / \[Rho]"}, {"(MeV)", "(cm 2 /g)", "(cm 2 /g)"}, {0.001, 10570., 10490.},{0.00104695, 9307., 9241.}, {0.0010961, 8242., 8186.}, {"L1", 0.0010961, 9347., 9282.}, {0.0015, 4418., 4393.}, {0.002, 2154., 2142.}, {0.003, 748.8, 743.}, {0.004, 347.3, 343.2}, {0.005, 189.9, 186.6}, {0.006, 115.6, 112.8}, {0.008, 52.55, 50.54}, {0.0089789, 38.29, 36.52}, {"K", 0.0089789, 278.4, 182.4}, {0.01, 215.9, 148.4}, {0.015, 74.05, 57.88}, {0.02, 33.79, 27.88}, {0.03, 10.92, 9.349}, {0.04, 4.862, 4.163}, {0.05, 2.613, 2.192}, {0.06, 1.593, 1.29}, {0.08, 0.763, 0.5581}, {0.1, 0.4584, 0.2949}, {0.15, 0.2217, 0.1027}, {0.2, 0.1559, 0.05781}, {0.3, 0.1119, 0.03617}, {0.4, 0.09413, 0.03121}, {0.5, 0.08362, 0.02933}, {0.6, 0.07625, 0.02826}, {0.8, 0.06605, 0.02681}, {1., 0.05901, 0.02562}, {1.25, 0.05261, 0.02428}, {1.5, 0.04803, 0.02316}, {2., 0.04205, 0.0216}, {3., 0.03599, 0.02023}, {4., 0.03318, 0.01989}, {5., 0.03177, 0.01998}, {6., 0.03108, 0.02027}, {8., 0.03074, 0.021}, {10., 0.03103, 0.02174}, {15., 0.03247, 0.02309}, {20., 0.03408, 0.02387}}

Is there anyway I could do this in MATLAB without writing code to parse the information returned by webread()?

Thanks,

Neil

[Neil Fazel]

Thank you. I will try that.

Neil

Answer 1

[Sindar]

check out htmlTableToCell on the file exchange, followed by cell2table