Auto-enforce matlab editor auto indentation?

I'm trying to build a system for enforcing coding standards on m-files in our code repository. To accomplish this, I'm creating a Matlab script that can run from the command line that will check all the files and report anomalies to the standard (exiting with exit(0) if everything is ok and with exit(1) if there are problems... will be part of a continuous integration runner).

One of the elements of our standard is that the mlint must be clean. This is pretty easily checked with Matlab's build-in checkcode function.

Another element of the standard is that indentation follows the recommendations of the Matlab editor smart indentation tool. This is proving harder to check programatically. I'd like to find a way to see if the standard indentation is being followed, i.e. if I were to run the smart indentation from the Matlab editor ( ctrl-a, ctrl-i ), would any part of the file change?

Are there ways to programatically run Matlab editor commands on m-files, something that could be used to recursively run smart indentation on all files in a folder structure?

Also, I'm barking up the wrong wrong tree entirely? Are there existing coding standard enforcement packages for Matlab (something like clang-tidy in c++) that I could be using instead?

[Rian Koja]

By the way, did you suceed in your standard enforment endevour? Would you be able to share your script on the FileExchange repository?

[Nathan Fitzgerald]

I half succeeded. The warning detection based on checkcode works fine. The part about enforcing the editor autoindentation worked perfectly when running on my laptop. However, the whole point of the exercise was to run a script from the command line with the "--no-display" option in a continous integration environment linked to our Git repository. This could allow merge/pull requests to be denied if the files were not properly formatted. Unfortunately, the matlab.desktop.editor package is not loaded when matlab is run in "--no-display" mode (at least in 2015b), so my script did not run properly in the CI environment.

I don't think I can share the script outright, but it was basically (in psuedocode):

for file = cellArrayOfEveryFileInTheRepo
    results = checkcode( file{1} );
    if ~isempty(results)
        exit(1);
    end
end
exit(0);

with some extra stuff for printing the offending file info to the screen.

Answer 1

[Steven Lord]

There is an API that allows you to interact with documents in the Editor. For example, I have a file named example54.m in my current directory.

theDocument = matlab.desktop.editor.openDocument(fullfile(pwd, 'example54.m'));
smartIndentContents(theDocument);
save(theDocument);
close(theDocument);

See the help for the matlab.desktop.editor package for more information.

[Nathan Fitzgerald]

Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for.