Clean and automate indents in scripts an live scripts

Hi everyone,

Please, do you have any tips to automate indentation in scripts?

Example by the picture below:

[Catalytic]

Please do not insert screenshots of code when text will suffice. It prevents us from copy/pasting the example.

Answer 1

[Matt J]

Download my editorExtract and editorReplace tools,

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/181000-customized-text-modification-buttons-for-the-matlab-editor

Then add the function below as a Quick Access Toolbar button. You can then highlight the text you want to modify and apply the button to obtain text with all the "=" signs lined up.

function favoriteAlignEqualSigns()

 [txt,info]=editorExtract(1);

 before= char(extractBefore(txt,"="));
 after = char(extractAfter(txt,"="));

 newtxt=before+" = "+after;
 editorReplace(newtxt,info);

end

Note that this function assumes one assignment statement per line of code (like in your example), and does no error checking to that effect.

[Silvio Rizzuto]

Thank you so much Matt!

Your toolbox seems a good first step. I will test it as soon as possible!

Answer 2

[Les Beckham]

I think that Matt's answer is a bit more elegant, although I think it (at least as first posted) just adds spaces before and after each equals sign rather than lining them up. I don't see anything that detects which column they should be aligned on. Here is a function which does do that.

% alignEquals.m
%
% Lines up the equals signs in the selected text in the active Matlab editor document.


function alignEquals()

ed = matlab.desktop.editor.getActive;
selected_lines = matlab.desktop.editor.textToLines(ed.SelectedText); % cell array containing the selected lines
eqIdx = strfind(selected_lines, '='); % find the index for all of the equals signs
maxeqIdx = max([eqIdx{:}]); % index of the farthest right equals sign

% align all of the equals signs with the farthest right equals sign
for iLine = 1:numel(selected_lines)
    if isempty(selected_lines{iLine}), continue, end % skip empty lines
    if isempty(eqIdx{iLine}), continue, end % skip lines with no equals sign
    selected_lines{iLine} = strrep(selected_lines{iLine}, '=', [repelem(' ', maxeqIdx - eqIdx{iLine}) '=']);
end

newText = matlab.desktop.editor.linesToText(selected_lines); % selected text with the equals signs lined up

ed.Text = strrep(ed.Text, ed.SelectedText, newText); % replace the text in the editor document

end

[Matt J]

I don't see anything that detects which column they should be aligned on.

Let's try it:

txt=[
"s.a=1;"
"s.bbbbbb=2;"
]

txt = 2×1 string array
    "s.a=1;"
    "s.bbbbbb=2;"

favoriteAlignEqualSigns(txt)

ans = 2×1 string array
    "s.a      = 1;"
    "s.bbbbbb = 2;"

function newtxt = favoriteAlignEqualSigns(txt)

 before= char(extractBefore(txt,"="));
 after = char(extractAfter(txt,"="));
 newtxt=before+" = "+after;

end

[Les Beckham]

Clever! Thanks.

So the conversion of a string array to char magically pads the strings so that each row of chars is the same length. Cool.

As I said, much more elegant than my brute force approach.

[Silvio Rizzuto]

Thank you very much for your interest and support.

Glad to get from community her help. 👏💪

[Silvio Rizzuto]

Please, let me add an additionnal detail after using. Avoid "=" in comments. I changeet for ":" and everythings go good.