Lobster, a simple template engine for MATLAB

Lobster is a template engine for MATLAB with a syntax quite similar to Jinja, a template engine implemented in python. A template engine is useful if you need to create documents with a repetitive syntax. I use them for example to

• generate C++ to convert enumeration fields to and from strings,

• generate HTML content

• generate latex contents from MATLAB variables.

Let’s start with a simple example of the syntax. Create a file called template.tpl with the following contents

Welcome {{ FirstName }},

Your grocery list contains:

{% for item in groceries %}
- {{ item.name }} {% if item.quantity > 1 %}(x{{ item.quantity}}){% endif %}
{% endfor %}

If you’ve downloaded Lobster and added it to your path then using the template is as simple as:

context = struct( ...
    'FirstName', 'Thibaud', ...
    'Groceries', {'Milk', 'Eggs', 'Bacon', 'Nutella'} ...
);

template = Lobster('template.tpl').render(context);

The rendered template is stored in the template variable. What you do with it is up to you. The full documentation can be found in the github repo.