How do I wrap text using the disp or display function?

When writing a string using the disp or display function, sometimes the text runs off the page, which is unhelpful when publishing. I tried breaking the string and using an ellipsis (...), then reintroducing the string on the next line, though this leads to an unexpected MATLAB error. This is especially frustrating when the string is saved inside of a variable that I'm trying to display.

Example of problem: disp('abcdefghijklmnop' ...

'qrstuvwxyz')

How can I avoid this problem?

Answer 1

[Roger Stafford]

I suggest using 'fprintf' instead of 'disp'. The "\n" symbol will give a new line.

Answer 2

[Chad Greene]

I wrote a function for this called wraptext.

Answer 3

[Karol Ondrejkovic]

I found this solution in comments of Chad Green's wraptext function. Works well to me and I'm using it in livescript publishing.

Roberto Tron on 15 Aug 2018

The functionality can be easily and more efficiently implemented using string replacement with regular expression. E.g., to wrap text to 80 columns:

strWrapped=regexprep(str,'.{1,80}\s','$0\n');

Answer 4

[Steven Lord]

You could use the textwrap function to wrap the text manually.

a = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog";
b = textwrap(a, 40)

b = 2×1 cell array
    {'The quick brown fox jumped over the '}
    {'lazy dog'                            }

strlength(b{1})

ans = 36

If you're writing this in code, you can either concatenate the text together and use an ellipsis inside the square brackets:

c = ['The quick brown fox jumped over the ', ...
     'lazy dog']

c = 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog'

Or if you're using a string array use + at the end of the first line followed by an ellipsis.

c = "The quick brown fox jumped over the " + ...
     "lazy dog"

c = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"