CODEWITHSUNDEEP
matlaburlprintf
Peter Hummer
Peter Hummer

Reputation: 13

creating url with sprintf creates wrong url

I am trying to create a ulr using sprintf. To open various websites I changed part of the URL using sprintf. Now the following code writes 3times the url instread of replacing part of the url????Any suggestions?Many thanks!!

current_stock = 'AAPL';

current_url = sprintf('http://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=%d&ty=c&ta=0&p=d',current_stock)
web(current_url, '-browser')

%d should be the place holer for appl. Result is : 

http://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=65&ty=c&ta=0&p=dhttp://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=65&ty=c&ta=0&p=dhttp://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=80&ty=c&ta=0&p=dhttp://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=76&ty=c&ta=0&p=d

Upvotes: 0

Views: 280

Answers (2)

paxdiablo
paxdiablo

Reputation: 882146

I'm not sure why you're using %d for a value that is clearly a string? You should be using %s.

The reason you're seeing what you're seeing is that it appears to be giving you a copy of your format string for each character in the AAPL string.

You can see that the differences lie solely in the ?t=XX bit, with XX being, in sequence, 65, 65, 80 and 76, the ASCII codes for the four letters in your string:

                                   vv
http://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=65&ty=c&ta=0&p=d
http://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=65&ty=c&ta=0&p=d
http://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=80&ty=c&ta=0&p=d
http://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=76&ty=c&ta=0&p=d
                                   ^^

Whether that's a feature or bug in MatLab (a), I couldn't say for sure, but I suspect it'll fix itself if you just use the correct format specifier.

(a) It's probably a feature since it does similarly intelligent stuff with other mismatches, as per here:

If you apply a string conversion (%s) to integer values, MATLAB converts values that correspond to valid character codes to characters. For example, '%s' converts [65 66 67] to ABC.

Upvotes: 3

fpe
fpe

Reputation: 2750

I would follow this easy way:

current_stock = 'AAPL';
current_url = ['http://www.finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=%d&ty=c&ta=0&p=d',current_stock];
web(current_url,'-browser')

That redirected me to a valid webpage.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions