How to write Continue Long Statements on Multiple Lines ?

formatSpec = '%f%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%f%f%q%q%q%f%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%f%q%q%f%q%q%f%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%C%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%f%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%f%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%q%[^\n\r]';

Answer 1

[Steven Lord]

Another way to do this, with a sufficiently recent release of MATLAB, is to join elements of a string array together with the repeated elements of the format being duplicated with repelem. The second input to join says to concatenate the string array elements with nothing between them.

join(["%f", repelem(["%q", "%f", "%q", "%f"], [45 2 3 2]), "%[^\n\r]"], "")

[dpb]

Ah! Nice refinement, Steven...hadn't thought of it.

Answer 2

[dpb]

The ugliness of the C-style formatting string in all its glory exhibited!!! Why TMW didn't go to the trouble to keep Fortran FORMAT instead. :(

Anyways, don't do this...do something like

fmt=['%f' repmat('%q',1,45) repmat('%f',1,2) repmat('%q',1,3) repmat('%f',1,2) ...
     ... 
    '%[^\n\r]'];

where continue to build the counted substrings as needed in place of "..." placeholders above.

The answer to the actual Q? asked is the line continuation syntax in Matlab is "...". For string continuation, must terminate the pieces on each line and let the input parser string them together; the above syntax encloses the actual strings excepting the first and last unique entries as the argument to the repmat function.

PS. Thanks to SL, TMW for illustrating this idiom years ago... :)