Can I import history.m from 2013 to History.xml in 2014a?

Why OH why does Mathworks changes things that worked great in one version - I hate their new releases and the changes that simply frustrates how one is used to doing things.

For several releases now, I always copied my previous release's "history.m" file into the appropriate directory and I could go on with what I had done. Come 2014a, they decided to make the history into an XML file and I am now grinding my teeth in frustration, because I cannot simply use the up arrow and go with what I was doing before I updated to the new release. I have to keep the old history file open and copy and paste from there. I had my history set to 50,000, so I remembered some years of commands. Very helpful when I want to remember the set of commands I used on a specific day in the past.

Mathworks - your ribbon interface was a bad idea, now this history is a bad idea. Maybe it is time to abandon Matlab and find an alternate....

[Student OfWorld]

I agree! this is extremely frustrating.

Has someone come up with a way/script to parse old history.m files into this novel History.xml format? I must have approx. 2 years worth of commands that I'd very much like to access by hitting the top arrow button...

Answer 1

[Peter Muellers]

When upgrading from the immediate preceding release, in this case from R2013b to R2014a, the previous history should be brought along automatically. If you have skipped a release you can do the following:

1. Exit MATLAB if it is running
2. Delete history.xml and history.bak if they exist from the R2014a preferences folder
3. Copy history.m from a previous release preferences folder into the R2014a prefercences folder
4. Restart MATLAB. It should do a one-time read from history.m. Going forward the history will be saved to and read from history.xml

[Abderrahman ATIFI]

It doesn't work. Thanks for wasting our time.

[Brian]

Worked great for me!

Thanks a lot!

Maybe it is easyer with a given path. I found the according files at:

C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming\MathWorks\MATLAB\R2014a

C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming\MathWorks\MATLAB\R2012a

respectively (Using a Win7 machine).

[Hazem]

It also worked with me. Great. Thanks a lot.

Also the same paths as Brian (Win 7). I upgraded from R2013a into R2014a, so there is also one skip in my case. I also preferred the old text format (.m) because you could read it as a text file in an M-file and 'eval' the commands.

Abderrahman, if you could tell what exactly did not work with you, may be someone could help. Btw, you can get the path to your history file using the 'prefdir' command.

[Thomas Lobay]

This does not work for me. I am going from R2012b to R2014b on a Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit. Is there a fix for linux users without resorting to a third party converter.

[Martin Siler]

The same for me. You need to take your history.m rename it to History.xml but keep orignal History.xml opened elsewhere.

1. Replace all occurences of < and > by html entities & lt; and & gt; (remove space between & and the rest, it was automaticalicaly visualized by html viewer here into < >)
2. Then replace all lines by <command> line content </command>. I used kate and regular expression in replacement as ^(.*)$ and replaced it by <command>\1<\command>
3. Then add header and footer form original History.xml

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <history>
 <session>

and footer

 </session>
 </history>

Probably all can automated using sed and awk

Good Luck

Answer 2

[Jan-Gerrit]

Is there a way to call the internal java function to do the conversion? I have multiple history.m files and don't really want to restart matlab every time i want to use one of them..

Loading the file with com.mathworks.mde.cmdhist.AltHistory.load(someFile, false); does not work.

Thanks Jan