Re: [OctDev] allowing mex to pass in a help string?

[Paul K. <pki...@us...>]

On Sep 9, 2004, at 8:10 PM, Dan McMahill wrote:

> With matlab mex, I typically would do something like create
>
> myfn.c  -- the C-mex file
> myfn.m  -- a matlab.m file which is only comments for the help output
>
> then when I do 'help myfn' in matlab I get the help text.
>
> With the octave mex interface it seems like I can sort of get there
> by creating the .m file, but what I get for help output is
>
> type(file_in_loadpath('myfn.m'))
>
> If I execute that, I get the contents of myfn.m including the '%' 
> comments
> which means I can't just paste a multi-line example into octave.
>
> I guess I can use awk or sed to strip the leading '%' and have the .m
> file really just be a text help file, but it would seem that it might 
> be
> nice to have a more automated way of getting the help to work.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> I don't mind hacking on the mex script if thats whats needed.

Hacking the mex script is going to be the easiest.  I'm guessing
you know what to do: if myfn.m exists when compiling a mex
file, pipe it through sed to strip the comment characters and to
add "\n\" to the end of every line, then put the output in place of
the "type(file_in_loadpath" text in the cc-file that gets created.

Long term octave should be modified so that it includes mex.cc,
and can load a precompiled mex file.  When it loads the myfun.mex,
it can load myfn.m at the same time and populate  the docstring of
the symbol.

- Paul