How can I access the saved command history in MATLAB?

I have a number of commands appearing in my Command History window, which I would like to extract for other uses.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

Prior to MATLAB R2014a the "history.m" file in the preference directory stores all the commands from the command history. Starting with MATLAB R2014a the commands are stored in an XML file history.xml in the preference directory. The location of the directory can be found by executing the following on

MATLAB command prompt.

>>prefdir

The following is a MATLAB file exchange submission which users may found useful to search for terms in the MATLAB command history.https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/50551-hxsearch

Answer 2

[Adam Danz]

I was also searching for a solution to a similar problem and wanted to note my solution here in case others are still looking.

Matlab versions R2014a and later store command history in history.xml while earlier versions store command history in history.m in prefdir. My work stations have earlier versions while my home desktop has later version. So, I wrote a function that searches command history no matter what version of matlab is installed. This function extracts commands in the form of character strings as described in the question above.

If anyone else is interested:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/50551-hxsearch

[dpb]

I made mod to be able to open an arbitrary history file -- the desktop died and had to keep going on a time-critical piece of work so moved stuff from backups/old drive to laptop, including the history file. For expediency, I just copied it into my cwd and pointed prefsdir to it...using Case 2 to do so...

    ....
case 2 % specific history file instead -- looks in cwd at moment
    %search History.xml (this conditional section inserted by dpb )
    prefdir=cd;                                 % look in current directory first
    hpath = fullfile(prefdir,'History.xml');
    if exist(hpath,'file')
        % Read the XML file into a string to look as the older history.m (i.e. remove all XML tags)
        mathist = fileread(hpath);
        mathist = regexprep(mathist, '(<[^>]+>\s*)+', '$$**@@', 'lineanchors');	% '$$**@@' arbitrarily chosen to mark end of each line for later parsing
        % translate html entities and remove leading newline
        mathist = strrep(mathist(7:end), '&gt;', '>');
        mathist = strrep(mathist, '&lt;', '<');
        % replace \r and \r\n with \n (safe to copy between OSes)
        mathist = regexprep(mathist, '\r(\n)?', '\n');
        % parse mathist into cell
        mathist = strsplit(mathist, '$$**@@');
    else
        disp ('History.xml not found.  No history in current working directory.')
        disp ('Not yet generalized to open any history.xml file location.')
        return
    end
end

Had to adjust the check on allowable inputs for session, too, of course...