a question about websave

There is a webpage "test.com/data" and a file "2022_06_18_abdacadabra.xlsx" is posted on that webpage. There doeThe file name changes each day, like it was "2022_06_17_abdacadabra.xlsx." I want to be able to download this file using websave using the wildcard for the date part of the file name. How will it work?

[Chris Burschyk]

Maybe something like this. Only works if the file is downloadable via that url. Instead of 'today' you can use any other date.

url = sprintf("https://www.test.com/data/%s_abdacadabra.xlsx",datetime('today',"Format","yyyy_MM_dd"))

url = "https://www.test.com/data/2022_06_18_abdacadabra.xlsx"

websave("PathToFile",url)

Error using websave
The connection to URL 'https://www.test.com/data/2022_06_18_abdacadabra.xlsx' timed out after 5.000 seconds. The reason is "Connection timeout after 5100 ms". Perhaps the server is not responding or
weboptions.Timeout needs to be set to a higher value.

[alpedhuez]

Let me work on it.

Answer 1

[Divyam]

Hi @alpedhuez,

The "websave" function does not natively support wildcards in URLs. To download a file where the file name changes daily, you can programmatically construct the file name for the date and then pass the URL to the function.

Assuming that the file is in the "YYYY_MM_DD_abdacadabra.xlsx" format, here is the sample code to perform the above operation:

% Get today's date
today = datetime('today');

% Format the date as 'YYYY_MM_DD'
dateStr = datestr(today, 'yyyy_mm_dd');

% Construct the filename
fileName = [dateStr '_abdacadabra.xlsx'];

% Construct the full URL
url = ['https://test.com/data/' fileName];

% Local file path to save
outFile = fullfile(pwd, fileName);  % Save in current directory

% Download the file
try
    websave(outFile, url);
    fprintf('File downloaded successfully: %s\n', outFile);
catch ME
    fprintf('Failed to download file: %s\n', ME.message);
end

Note: A good practice is to ensure using RESTful web service calls within try/catch blocks to avoid undetected errors.

For more information regarding the "websave" function, refer to the following documentation: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/websave.html