Stuart’s MATLAB Videos

Finding and Removing HTML Elements from a Web Page

Stuart McGarrity — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:17:13 +0000

My script that looks for translation errors on our website is generating too many false positives. I need to ignore an area at the bottom of all pages, called the country selector which is a list of country names that are not translated. I first try to remove the country name strings after I have extracted the text from the web page, then I realize it would be better to find and remove specific HTML elements before extracting the text.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

Text Analytics Toolbox: getAttribute, extractHTML
arrayfun

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Concatenating Struct Arrays with Different Fields

Stuart McGarrity — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:25:37 +0000

When I read data from the web, using webread or websave, usually all records returned have the same information and, as a result, appear in MATLAB as a struct array. But sometimes they do not have the same information and appear as a cell array containing structures with different fields. This has recently happened in one of my scripts, so I need to address this but I think it would be useful for me to come up with a utility to handle this scenario in general, as it often happens.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

vertcat
setdiff

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Debugging a String Concatenation Error in My Web App

Stuart McGarrity — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:52:14 +0000

My colleague found a bug in my MATLAB Web app. She could see a string concatenation error message in the app logs. I will go through the normal steps I would take to debug and fix such an issue in my apps.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

App Designer
String concatenation

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Monitoring Continuously Running MATLAB Scripts with Power Automate

Stuart McGarrity — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 17:59:19 +0000

I have many MATLAB scripts and systems that are scheduled by Windows Task Scheduler or they run continuously in loops. For some of them I need to ensure that they’re always running because they carry out tasks that others rely on. If they fail or the machine they are running on reboots, its a problem.

To handle this, I use a simple method where the script periodically writes to a file, then I have a Power Automate flow check to ensure the file has been updated recently.

Your organization needs to utilize OneDrive or SharePoint and Power Automate for this to work.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

dir
readlines, writelines

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Solving Cody Problems 55220, 55230, and 55240

Stuart McGarrity — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 18:39:47 +0000

As Cody is having a contest at the moment, I thought I would try and solve a few problems. Here, I take a look at the first few problems in the MATLAB Fundamentals – Matrices and Arrays group.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

Indexing and Concatenation

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Adding a Case Insensitive Search Option to My Web App

Stuart McGarrity — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:46:28 +0000

I need to add some new controls to my web app that searches the HTML of our website. The web app communicates with another MATLAB via tcp/ip, so I will need to make UI and code changes in the app and also make changes in the script it talks to. I will need to switch back and forth between two machines for this.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

String searching
App Designer

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Using Implicit Expansion of Strings to Create a List of MATLAB Releases

Stuart McGarrity — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:14:40 +0000

I want to be able to create a string array that is a list of MATLAB releases for the last 10 years. e.g. [“R2014a”, “R2014b”, “R2015a”, “R2015b … “R2025a”].

I could use a for loop, or perhaps a nested for loop, but I suspect I can use the concept of implicit expansion with strings to do this in a simpler way.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

Strings
Implicit expansion

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Converting a Cell Array of Heterogenous Structures to a Structure Array

Stuart McGarrity — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 19:28:33 +0000

When I make a request to a web service I often use, I normally get back a struct array. Now, however, I have received a cell array of structs and I suspect that the structs have different fields.

I need to figure out how to convert this cell array into a homogenous struct array.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

fields, cellfun
struct2table

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Debugging Example: Navigating Workspaces

Stuart McGarrity — Mon, 05 May 2025 20:32:01 +0000

One of my scripts, processing video files using a VideoReader object, has errored, so I need to investigate to understand why. Because I have pause if error in my startup.m, execution has paused and I can query the data in workspaces. If the error occurs in a MathWorks written function, my first step is to navigate up the stack to the first function that I have created.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

VideoReader
Debugging
pause if error

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Making a Utility to Track MATLAB Start and Stop Times

Stuart McGarrity — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 20:45:08 +0000

I usually have multiple MATLABs running at any one time. Some I launch manually, and some start and stop on a schedule via Windows Task Manager. I want to do some analysis of my usage of these MATLABs, so I thought I’d write a utility to track the start and stop times of my various running MATLABs.

Features covered in this code-along style video include:

writetable, readtable
getenv

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