I've got a HUUUGE HTML file here saved on my system, which contains data from a product catalogue. The data is structured such that for each product record the name is between two tags (name) and (/name) .
Each product has up to 3 attributes: name, productID, and color, but not all products will have all these attributes.
How would I go about extracting this data for each product without mixing up the product attributes? The file is also 50 megabyte!
Code example ....
<name>'hat'</name>
blah blah blah
<prodId>'1829493'</prodId>
blah blah blah
<color>'cyan'</color>
blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
<name>'shirt'</name>
blah blah blahblah blah blah
<prodId>'193'</prodId>
<name>'dress'</name>
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
<prodId>'18'</prodId>
<color>'dark purple'</color>
A file of size 50 MB isn't so big that you can't just load its contents directly into MATLAB as a string, which you can do with the function FILEREAD:
strContents = fileread('yourfile.html');
Assuming the file format you have above, you can then parse the contents with the function REGEXP (using named token capture):
expr = '<(?<tag>name|prodId|color)>''([^<>]+)''</\k<tag>>';
tokens = regexp(strContents,expr,'tokens');
tokens = vertcat(tokens{:});
And the contents of token
using your sample file contents will be:
tokens =
'name' 'hat'
'prodId' '1829493'
'color' 'cyan'
'name' 'shirt'
'prodId' '193'
'name' 'dress'
'prodId' '18'
'color' 'dark purple'
You may then want to parse the resulting N-by-2 cell array and place the contents in a structure array with fields 'name'
, 'prodId'
, and 'color'
. The difficulty is that not every entry will have all three fields. Assuming each 'name'
will be followed by either a 'prodId'
, a 'color'
, or both (in the order 'prodId'
then 'color'
), then the following code should work for you:
s = struct('name',[],'prodId',[],'color',[]); %# Initialize structure
nTokens = size(tokens,1); %# Get number of tokens
nameIndex = find(strcmp(tokens(:,1),'name')); %# Find indices of 'name'
[s(1:numel(nameIndex)).name] = deal(tokens{nameIndex,2}); %# Fill 'name' field
%# Find and fill 'prodId' that follows a 'name':
index = strcmp(tokens(min(nameIndex+1,nTokens),1),'prodId');
[s(index).prodId] = deal(tokens{nameIndex(index)+1,2});
%# Find and fill 'color' that follows a 'name':
index = strcmp(tokens(min(nameIndex+1,nTokens),1),'color');
[s(index).color] = deal(tokens{nameIndex(index)+1,2});
%# Find and fill 'color' that follows a 'prodId':
index = strcmp(tokens(min(nameIndex+2,nTokens),1),'color');
[s(index).color] = deal(tokens{min(nameIndex(index)+2,nTokens),2});
And the contents of s
using your sample file contents will be:
>> s(1)
name: 'hat'
prodId: '1829493'
color: 'cyan'
>> s(2)
name: 'shirt'
prodId: '193'
color: []
>> s(3)
name: 'dress'
prodId: '18'
color: 'dark purple'
There are two ways of solving this sort of problem: string manipulation with regexes (as suggested by gnovice) or parsing the file (or a mix of the two). Parsing is often best if your file is very well structured; regexes win for messy files.
Here's the parsing solution.
Start by downloading xmliotools, and calling xml_read
on your file. Your example isn't completely reproducible, so here are two different versions of the data.
Save this to test1.xml
:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
<name>'hat'</name>
<prodId>'1829493'</prodId>
<color>'cyan'</color>
<name>'dress'</name>
<prodId>'18'</prodId>
<color>'dark purple'</color>
</root>
Save this to test2.xml
.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
<item>
<name>'hat'</name>
<prodId>'1829493'</prodId>
<color>'cyan'</color>
</item>
<item>
<name>'dress'</name>
<prodId>'18'</prodId>
<color>'dark purple'</color>
</item>
</root>
Now compare
x1 = xml_read('test1.xml')
x2 = xml_read('test2.xml')