@James – I don’t have an immediate answer for you, it requires some investigation. This sounds like a good idea for a future article. If you cannot wait for this article to appear, you could contact me by email (link at the top right of this page) to discuss a short consulting gig.

@Yair, That certainly sounds like a better idea, but I’m not sure how to proceed. Could you indicate how to modify the parseXML function from the xmlread help so that it used the SAX parser rather than the DOM returned by xmlread? Or am I on the wrong track?

@James – DOM is normally used for small XML models; SAX is usually better for large models that can be processed sequentially. There are numerous SAX parsers available online that you can use in Matlab. Perhaps the most widely used open-source XML parser, which includes support fro both SAX and DOM, is Xerces, which is already pre-bundled in Matlab (take a look at the %matlabroot%/java/jarext/ folder), so you can use it in Matlab out-of-the-box. Other well-known XML support packages, namely Xalan and Saxon, are also pre-bundled.

Do you have any suggestions?

Here’s a nicer “pretty-print”, which uses the undocumented InputSource input argument format of xlswrite:

fReader=java.io.FileReader(java.io.File(which('info.xml')));
xmlwrite(org.xml.sax.InputSource(fReader))

It seems that many people follow an unusal convention for the format of their xml files. Even The MathWork’s info.xml files don’t following the standard indented form for xml files. A quick way to “pretty print” an xml file is to use saveXML method of the DOM node ie:

x = xmlread(which('info.xml'));
x.saveXML(x.getDocumentElement)

Thanks for the good work,

Donn