I tried with this code:

jCodePane.setFont(java.awt.Font('Arial',java.awt.Font.PLAIN,8),1)

to change font type,size and style, but it does not work.
Also, how display the “line numbers”?

I’m not sure about the font, but here’s one way to display line numbers:

glyph = org.netbeans.editor.GlyphGutter(jCodePane.getEditorUI);
glyph.setSize(java.awt.Dimension(20, jCodePane.getHeight));

jPanel1 = javax.swing.JPanel;
jPanel1.getLayout.setHgap(0);
jPanel1.getLayout.setVgap(0);
jPanel1.add(glyph);

jPanel2 = javax.swing.JPanel(jPanel1.getLayout);
jPanel2.add(jPanel1);
jPanel2.add(jCodePane);

jScrollPane = com.mathworks.mwswing.MJScrollPane(jPanel2);
[jhPanel,hContainer] = javacomponent(jScrollPane,[10,10,300,50],gcf);

Note that even in the Matlab Editor line numbers are displayed in a separate glyph panel, and are not part of the syntax pane.

Hi Yair,

I’m trying to get the linenumbers in, but simply adding your code example to the syntaxpane example above, gives a very weird result, both in matlab 2012b and 2013b.

I must admit that I’m new to java in matlab, and i understand little of the code i am copy-pasting from your examples;
is there a way you should edit the position vector for it to work correctly, or is it simply broken in the newer matlab releases?

Thank you very much for sharing this extremely useful undocumented Matlab feature. I use it in several GUIs. One minor thing I am running into is that if a large text is loaded in the pane it automatically generates a scroll bar (great!), but the focus of the pane is on the end of the text. Is there a way to force the focus towards the top of the text (automatically move the scroll-bar all the way up)?

@Oscar – of course it can be done – ^[17]

Also read the related ^[18]

-Yair

I’m having some troubles loading text into the CodePane directly from .m files. If I use a standard fopen fgets/fgetl approach to populate a string with the contents of a .m file, I miss all the string formatting and have to insert formatting myself. But this becomes troublesome when I try to correct for i.e. sprintf’s interpretation of apostrophes, backslash and so on. Does a more direct method exist for doing this job?

@Sune – not that I know of. There’s a setFilename(string) method, but apparently it doesn’t do what you need (I’m not exactly sure what it does). I suggest reading the file as a simple text file, character-by-character, without any formatting, and let the code pane do all the formatting for you.

Hi Yair,

First of all, love your work, love your book.

I am currently implementing the syntaxpane in a GUI, where i would like to validate the matlab code entered.
Do you know if its possible to extract information about syntax-errors from the jCodePane object?

Hope you can help,

Jesper

@Jesper – thanks 🙂

I’m not sure if it’s possible to extract the information directly, but you could always ^[19].

Hi Yair,

That could indeed solve my issue. Thank you for the swift response !

[…] how to use other internal components in Matlab’s com.mathworks.widgets package, including syntax-highlighted labels and text panes that can be embedded in our Matlab GUI.Have you used BusyAffordance or some other internal Matlab […]

Hi Yair,

Thank you for this great article and the accompanying chapter in your book. I’ve enjoyed both thoroughly. The SyntaxTextPane seems perfect for an application I’m looking to write (a simple XML editor in MATLAB), but the only acceptable MIME-type as far I can tell is the MATLAB one. Passing in the XML MIME type does not seem to have any effect and passing in the HTML MIME type throws a Class Cast Exception (or something similar). I am on MATLAB R2013a.

Are you aware of any syntax highlighting functionality for languages other than MATLAB within SyntaxTextPane? If so, how can I activate that functionality? If not, is there a way for me to write my own syntax highlighting rules and pass them into an instance of SyntaxTextPane? Or, I noticed that the MATLAB Editor has rules for XML/HTML syntax highlighting… can I make use of that some how?

Thank you for your great work!

@Adam –

jCodePane.setContentType('text/xml-MATLAB')

The rest is as described in the main article above.

Hi Yair,
This is a great blog! I wouldn’t be able to do much java programming without it.

The SyntaxTextPane and the possibility to add line numbers as you showed in a comment is great. Is it also possible to include the code folding capability of the Matlab editor in this textpane? I haven’t been able to find any way of including a com.mathworks.widgets.text.fold.MWCodeFoldingSideBar which I think is the way to do it.
Your help is highly appreciated.

Björn

Hi, Yair,

Thank you very much for the info on your blog and book. They are very useful.

I came to this “syntax hilite” blog because I was searching how to delete all comments in an M-file. Since Matlab recognizes comments, and it doesn’t get confused by, for example, % comment text…, fprintf(‘%10.3f’), or sprintf(‘%% comment’), I want to utilize it and not reinvent the wheel like some existing file on the FileExchange.

But the question is: where can I find that method and in which class? What is the syntax for that method?

If you already have posts regarding to this topic, could you show me that article?

Thank you very much!

@John – to the best of my knowledge there is no direct method to do this. You are welcome to try to poke around in the Java classes mentioned in this article, but I don’t think it will get you what you want.

I’ve created a utility that does this (stripping comments from m-files) for my personal use and it works splendidly. I’m willing to sell you a copy if you wish – contact me by email (altmany at gmail) if you are interested.

Hello,

Thanks for so much work. So, I was wondering how can I check the documentation of all the JAVA classes I can use? For example, the method setContentType sets the syntax highlight. I would want to see the list of all the available constant values such as MIME.

@Shalin – the easiest way would be to simply Google it with the word “java” and the relevant keyword. For example, in your case: Google “java setContentType”. There’s plenty of online documentation on Java, way more than on Matlab.

Hi Yair,

Is there any way to implement this SyntaxPane functionality in the new uifigure-based apps? Thanks!

Adam – perhaps there is a builtin syntax-pane control for uifigures, but I am not aware of one.
Perhaps you can try to implement a uihtml panel with a GeSHi syntax-highlighter JavaScript library – this could be a very useful File Exchange utility for users.