Check Which Programs Have Help

To determine which of your programs files have help text, you can use the Help Report.

In the Help Report, you specify a set of help components for which you want to search, such as examples or See Also lines. For each file searched, MATLAB® displays the help text for the components it finds. Otherwise, MATLAB displays a highlighted message to indicate that the component is missing.

    Note:   MATLAB does not support creating Help Reports for live scripts. When creating a report for all files in a folder, all live scripts in the selected folder are excluded from the report.

To generate a Help Report, in the Current Folder browser, navigate to the folder you want to check, click , and then select Reports > Help Report. The Help Report displays in the MATLAB web browser.

    Note:   You cannot run reports when the path is a UNC (Universal Naming Convention) path; that is, a path that starts with \\. Instead, use an actual hard drive on your system, or a mapped network drive.

This table describes the available options for Help Reports.

Help Report OptionDescription

Show class methods

Include methods in the report. If you do not select this option, then the report includes results for classes, but not for methods within a class definition file.

Show all help

Display all help text found in each file. If you also select individual help components, such as Description, then help text appears twice in the report for each file: once for the overall help text, and once for the component.

If your program has the same name as other programs on the MATLAB search path, then the help command generates a list of those overloaded items. MATLAB automatically adds links to the help for those items.

Description

Check for an initial, nonempty comment line in the file. This line is sometimes called the H1 line.

Examples

Check for examples in the help text. The Help Report performs a case-insensitive search for a help line with a single-word variant of example. The report displays that line and subsequent nonblank comment lines, along with the initial line number.

See Also

Check for a line in the help that begins with the words See also. The report displays the text and the initial line number.

If the programs listed after See also are on the search path, then the help command generates hyperlinks to the help for those programs. The Help Report indicates when a program in the See also line is not on the path.

Copyright

Check for a comment line in the file that begins with the word Copyright. When there is a copyright line, the report also checks whether the end year is current. The date check requires that the copyright line includes either a single year (such as 2012) or a range of years with no spaces (such as 2001-2012).

The recommended practice is to include a range of years from the year you created the file to the current year.

Related Examples

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