@Andriy – When you run Matlab with -desktop, you see a native (not Java) command window console, and this console does not interpret the \b as a valid control character. \t is much more widely accepted than \b, so this is not surprising. I think it’s also not recognized in Windows DOS consoles. If you want to use a lightweight Matlab console, this naturally has a much more limited feature set.

Perhaps, my comment does not completely matches topic of this post, but it might be interested to those who runs MATLAB with -nodesktop option. In this case MATLAB handles backspace characters in even more unusual way. Just try to rung the following commands in command prompt:

for k=0:10, fprintf('abcd'); fprintf(['12345',repmat('\b',1,k),'67890\n']); end;
for k=0:10, fprintf('abcd'); fprintf(['12345',repmat('\t',1,k),'67890\n']); end;
 

Here (https://i.imgsafe.org/ebccebb279.png) is what I see in “-nodesktop” mode in R2015b.
Tabs are handled properly while back-spaces can not erase text printed by previous fprintf command and produce weird results.

Do you have any ideas how to send “\b” character properly to the command window in “-nodesktop” mode?

Yet another hard-coded hack. Of course all the regular CSS attributes like color or whatever don’t seem to work. Why couldn’t MathWorks stay consistent?! this is really beyond my understanding.

From R2011b and up (to my knowledge at least), MATLAB error messages include a bold hyperlink to relevant documentation. Try for yourself:

 
>> error
Error using error
Not enough input arguments.

If MATLAB can do this, so can we! Some mucking about with HTML resulted in the following semi-accidental discovery:

 
fprintf(1,'%s\n',...
    'matlab:%% do stuff',...
    'bold blue hyperlink'...
    )

This also combines with the ‘{\b … }\b’ method for printing orange text, or the directing the output to STDERR method for printing red text. It’s a bit clunky, but it works…

Unfortunately, it seems that this is another case of hard-coded syntax trapping, which means that it doesn’t respond to other HTML tricks. Anyway, have fun with this!

Kind regards,

Geert

PS. thanks a million for this blog; It has helped me out on many occasions! I’m glad I can make this little contribution.