extracthelp

Extract the help information of all M function in a folder

Description

extracthelp extracts the help lines of all .M files in the current folder and writes them in files (with corresponding names) in a sub-folder 'phelp'.

The function is very useful in combination with the 'pcode'. Whereas pcode creates a pre-parsed .P files, that can be distributed to users, that shouldn't have access to the original code, the .P files do not preserve the help information of the functions. The 'extracthelp' function does exactly this.

extracthelp % create the .\phelp folder and the help files for all files in the current folder
pcode *.m % convert all .M files to .P files
movefile('*.p','.\phelp') % moves the .P files to the \phelp folder the phelp folder contains the files you can now safely distribute

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.2 (R2006a)

[Sergiy]

It doesn't seem to be compatible with UNIX, OSX. It needs changes from '\' to filesep and something else. As is, it generates error:
>> extracthelp
 md phelp: Bus error

[Jan Simon]

I'd prefer "mkdir(foldername)" instead of "eval(['mkdir ' folder_name])".
The "fclose('all')" is not helpful, if a file cannot be opened. There is also no reason to close all files in case of success, prefer "fclose(F)".
Under Linux (and as far as I can see under modern Matlab versions under Windows also) the file separators are CHAR(10). Therefore checking for 13 is not secure.
You use "ind" as loop index of two nested loops. Although this might works, it is recommended to avoid this.