I recently learned how to download .pdf files using urlwrite, but I was wondering if there is any way to specify which pages of the .pdf to save.
The files are always either 1 or 2 pages long, and I only want to keep the first page of the .pdf. Is there any way to directly download just the first page, and if not, is there a way to download the entire .pdf and then get rid of the 2nd page?
I know that it is possible to manually get rid of the second page in Preview or Adobe Acrobat and other applications, but it'd make things a lot easy if I could automate the process in MATLAB.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Find an appropriate command line tool (example uses pdftk), and then you can make a call to it from MATLAB. Use sprintf to assemble the appropriate command and then pass it to system. This puts the output in a temporary file then uses movefile to change the filename back:
temp = 'sometempfile.pdf';
urlwrite(someurl, filename);
system(sprintf('pdftk %s cat 1 output %s dont_ask',filename,temp));
movefile(temp, filename);
Related
I want to build a simple script that may be useful for others as well, but I have only very basic programming knowledge and can't do it myself without learning how to write powershell scripts from scratch.
What this script is supposed to do is, open an INI file (really just a txt), look for a variable with an assigned value and replace that value from a txt hosted on GitHub, save and then run a program.
This is for the tracker list of qBittorrent, since that feature still hasn't been implemented and the only other script that I could find that does this is for linux and mac, there seem to be none for windows.
The basic idea is this:
get-content "c:\users\[user]\appdata\roaming\qbittorrent\qbittorrent.ini"
# This is where pseudo code starts
get file from "[github-link.txt]"
save file to cache # keeping it is useless as it gets updated daily
find variable "Session\AdditionalTrackers=" in qbittorrent.ini
replace value of variable with content of cached file # this is what I struggle with most when looking for example code. Everything I could find specified the exact string that needed replacing, which in this case is quite long and may change with every update of the file.
overwrite original file
launch program qbittorrent.exe
end script
Conveniently or most likely deliberately all (most) of the tracker lists on GitHub are already formatted in a way that they can be directly pasted into the file without having to worry about formatting. Example.
I can totally understand if nobody wants to do the work, but I would greatly appreciate it and possibly others that are looking for a stopgap for the lacking feature.
If this already exists, go ahead and call me an idiot and while you're at it drop a link ;)
I just found a little tool called Power Automate and it pretty much does what I was looking for. It's not quite as elegant as a single click script but it does the job. Sadly I can't share the "flow" I built because, well, there is no option for it - thanks Microsoft. So, I'll try my best to write it out.
Not quite a "solution" but pretty to close to it.
Here is the "flow":
get file from web // from github for example
read text from file // read downloaded .txt file
read text from file // read qBittorrent.ini
crop text // crop between flags in qBittorrent.ini use "Session\AdditionalTrackers=" as start and "Session\GlobalMaxRatio=" as end and save to cropVar2
crop text // crop before flag use "Session\AdditionalTrackers=" as flag and save to cropVar1
crop text // crop after flag use cropVar2 as flag and save to cropVar3
replace text // replace cropVar2 with content of downloaded file and save to cropVar2
write text to file // write cropVar1,cropVar2,cropVar3
end flow
Keep in mind that any changes to the qBittorrent.ini may change the order of the entries. Which means you have to check if it's still correct after every update and after every change you make in the options. This is a massive cludge after all...
You can input fail saves so that you won't break anything if the order changed.
I've checked "Similar questions" and went through a lot of search but I can't seem to find a way to combine the snippets I already figured out; would be awesome if someone is able to help.
Using pdftk, alternatively running through PowerShell
I got two .pdf files (f.e.: A=1000 pages, B=5000 pages) which I need to combine in a specific way to generate a new .pdf file. In detail I need page 1-3, 4-6[...] of file A merged with page 1-4, 4-8[...] of file B with a blank page between 1-3 & 4-6.
So far I figured how to burst the files, add a blank page and combine them to a new .pdf file. Yet I'm only able to that for one needed document at a time (a new file with 8 pages).
pdftk fileC.pdf fileD.pdf cat output fileE.pdf
pdftk A=fileE.pdf B=blankpage.pdf cat A1-1 B1-1 A2-4 output conclusion.pdf
Now I'm wondering if there's a way to output the complete file with a command? Otherwise I'd have to do it for every merge of two long files.
Thanks in advance!
I've been trying to make the output shown in the text file instead of the command window. Im blur right now as i already look at a lot of example but it always show the error on fprintf. I try to edit the code of fprintf(fid,'%s\n',word);%Write 'word' in text file (upper) in one of the Matlab example which is Automatically Detect and Recognize Text in Natural Images.
This is the link of the code.
https://www.mathworks.com/help/vision/examples/automatically-detect-and-recognize-text-in-natural-images.html?s_tid=srchtitle
Basically the above link display the output on the command window. But, i need it to be on the txt file.
Im really new to this, i want to know what code do i need to put, how and where should i put the fprintf to make the output shown on the text file and not on the command window.
Also, can i save the text file after that? do i to put any additional code?
I really need your help. Thank u in advance!
It seems you're looking for the fopen() method. It takes two parameters, the first being the name of the file you'd like to write to, and the second being the mode. If the file specified does not exist in the root directory, it will be created on execution.
fileID = fopen('exp.txt','w');
fprintf(fileID, fid,'%s\n', word);
fclose(fileID); % Make sure to always close the stream after finishing
More on fopen() here
I am trying to write a script that will allow me to download numerous (1000s) of data files from a data server (e.g, http://hydro1.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/thredds/catalog/GLDAS_NOAH10SUBP_3H/2011/345/). Unfortunately, the names of the files in each directory are not formatted in a similar way (the time that they were created were appended to the end of the file name). I need to be able to specify the file name to subset the data (I have a special tool for these data types) and download it. I cannot find a function in matlab that will extract the file names.
I have looked at URLREAD, but it downloads everything including html code.
Thanks for your help!
You can easily parse the link.
x=urlread(url)
links=regexp(x,'<a href=''([^>]+)''>','tokens')
Reads every link, you have to filter all unwanted links.
For example this gets all grb files:
a=regexp(x,'<a href=''([^>]+.grb)''>','tokens')
I want to automate Excel using Perl to do the following task(s):
For a list of Excel .xls files, do the following:
Open the file
Set Format to CSV
Save the file under the original filename and directory, but replace the extension "xls" with "csv"
Close the file
End
I found how to open files, even how to save them. I did not find how to change the fileformat/save as a different format. There shall be no user dialogs popping up, it should be fully automated. The Excel file list I can generate myself, a parameterized "find" or maybe "dir" should suffice.
If you are using Excel automation a great help is Excel itself. Use the VBA environment (Alt+F11) to get help for the Excel objects you want to use.
The objectbrowser (F2) is very valuable.
Workbook.SaveAs([Filename], [FileFormat], [Password], [WriteResPassword], [ReadOnlyRecommended], [CreateBackup], [AccessMode As XlSaveAsAccessMode = xlNoChange], [ConflictResolution], [AddToMru], [TextCodepage], [TextVisualLayout], [Local])
Searching for CSV in the object browser will show Excel constants with their values, since you probably cannot use these Excel constants in Perl.
See Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and xls2csv, they will help you.