How to fprintf with

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JMP Phillips
JMP Phillips on 2 Sep 2015
Commented: JMP Phillips on 4 Sep 2015
I want to fprintf to a text file a cell with contents '\begin{table}' the problem is it doesn't work because matlab thinks \b is a control character. How to do this?
  2 Comments
Greig
Greig on 2 Sep 2015
What version of MATLAB are you using? Can you give an example of what you have tried.
On 2014a, this simple example works OK....
T = {'\begin{Table}'}
fout=fopen('Test_File.dat', 'wt');
fprintf(fout, '%s\n', T{:});
And the output file contains
\begin{Table}
Simply using
fprintf(fout, '%s\n', '\begin{Table}');
Also gives the same result
JMP Phillips
JMP Phillips on 2 Sep 2015
Thankyou, the %s\n works. If you repost as an answer I can accept it (otherwise I don't think you get any credit).

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Accepted Answer

Greig
Greig on 3 Sep 2015
Expanding my comment above to add in some LaTex specific requirements, here is a basic working example
% Define some data
T = [{'Header1'}, {'Header2'}, {'Header3'}; {1.234343}, {32.131234}, {85.23401}; {0.1123}, {0.12213}, {4}];
fout=fopen('Test_File.dat', 'wt');
fprintf(fout, '%s\n', '\begin{table}'); % start the table
fprintf(fout, '%s & %s & %s \\\\\n', T{1,:}); % print the header
fprintf(fout, '%2.3f & %2.3f & %2.3f \\\\\n', T{2:end,:}); % print the data
fprintf(fout, '%s', '\end{table}'); % end the table
fclose(fout)
  1 Comment
JMP Phillips
JMP Phillips on 4 Sep 2015
Thanks for the example. I use the matlab-data-to-latex-table package, to get the correctly formatted latex table as a Nx1 cell, then it's just
for i = 1:N
fprintf(fileID, '%s\n',latex_table{i});
end
to print to file.

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More Answers (2)

Stephen23
Stephen23 on 2 Sep 2015
Edited: Stephen23 on 2 Sep 2015
The easiest solution is to supply the string as an argument, and not define it in the format string itself, then you do not need to escape any characters at all because characters in argument arrays are interpreted literally:
fprintf(fid, '%s', '\begin{table}The student scored 82.3\%');
You could even do something neat like this, which provides a newline but without changing the input string:
fprintf(fid, '%s\n', '\begin{table}The student scored 82.3\%');

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 2 Sep 2015
If you must code the '\begin{table}' in the format specification instead of in the data like Grieg shows, then you need to use two \ for each place you want a single \ in output.
fprintf(fid, '\\begin{table}')
You also need to use %% to represent any % characters that must appear literally, such as
fprintf(fid, '\\begin{table}The student scored 82.3%%');
  2 Comments
Greig
Greig on 2 Sep 2015
Since I assume they are writing a table to LaTeX, to fit the LaTeX syntax they will need to throw in an extra '\\' so that the % sign appears correctly in the final table
fprintf(fid, '\\begin{table}The student scored 82.3\\%%');
There are a couple of functions on the FileExchange for formatting MATLAB output to LaTeX. They maybe useful, but I have never tried them
JMP Phillips
JMP Phillips on 2 Sep 2015
Edited: JMP Phillips on 2 Sep 2015
I am using this one which is the best I've found, but I had to modify it for non-numeric data: https://au.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/44274-converting-matlab-data-to-latex-table

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