Data Manipulation Toolbox

Manipulation of data such as string, array, cell array and struct, and a unit testing framework

Data Manipulation Toolbox (dmtoolbox) is a MATLAB toolbox to facilitate the general programming using various data structures such as string, arrays, cell arrays and struct arrays. Despite that MATLAB has offered a series of builtin functions to manipulate these elements, nontrivial efforts are still needed to accomplish some advanced operations. This toolbox aims at complementing some functions that MATLAB currently lacks instead of replacing the existing ones.

Here is a brief list of the functionality offered by the dmtoolbox

Common Utilities
The functions for logical judgment, conditional counting, array selection, and the computation of Cartesian product.

String Manipulation and Formatting
The functions for generating strings in different types, formatting strings, extracting information from strings, and converting strings.

Cell Array Manipulation
The functions for logical judgment, conditional counting, element selection, selective removal, and conversion of cell arrays.

Struct Array Manipulation
The functions for sorting and converting struct arrays from/to different data structures.

Mapping (Look-Up-Table)
The functions to construct maps(also known as dictionary, hash table, or loop-up-table), and map a scalar or a string to the corresponding value.

Unit Testing Framework
It is a flexible and lightweight framework with classes and functions to assist unit testing in MATLAB. You can make use of the framework to write testing functions with assertions, group them into test cases and test suites. The framework monitors the running of all test cases and records all assertion checking results and exceptions, and reports to the user as well.

Elaborate help has been provided within each m-function, with sufficient examples to show their usage. In addition, well-formated HTML help of this toolbox is made available in the MATLAB Help Browser. You can readily refer to it by finding the Data Manipulation Toolbox in the list of MATLAB Help Contents or simply typing dmdoc in MATLAB command line.

To assure the quality, a comprehensive testsuite has been written to check whether all functions work properly. After installing the toolbox, you may type in dmtoolbox_test to run the tests to verify that the toolbox can work normally in your MATLAB environment. The whole testsuite is written based on the unit testing framework offered in the toolbox, which in itself is a good example to show how to use the testing framework.