alibaba
by Tim C. Lueth, SG-Lib Toolbox: SolidGeometry 5.6 - Auxiliary function
Introduced first in SolidGeometry 5.0, Creation date: 2020-09-28, Last change: 2025-09-14
just opens the website of this company
Description
In order to avoid the distraction of unwanted marketing and advertising by both operating system vendors and browser manufacturers as well as the companies themselves, I have written a series of functions that call relevant WWW pages directly from Matlab
These functions will not be part of the SG-Lib, as they provide information about my personal way of working and my current research activities. The SG-Lib should help other people to pursue their own ideas and not my ideas.
See Also:
Example Illustration
Syntax
alibaba([text])
Input Parameter
Examples
alibaba
alibaba Motor N20
Copyright 2020-2025 Tim C. Lueth. All rights reserved. The code is the property of Tim C. Lueth and may not be redistributed or modified without explicit written permission. This software may be used free of charge for academic research and teaching purposes only. Commercial use, redistribution, modification, or reverse engineering is strictly prohibited. Access to source code is restricted and granted only under specific agreements. For licensing inquiries or commercial use, please contact: Tim C. Lueth
Algorithm (Workflow)
This function, named alibaba, is designed to open a web page for searching components on Alibaba. It is part of the SolidGeometry library and was introduced in version 5.0. The function takes a single optional input parameter, text, which is a string used for the search query.
Input Parameters
- text: A string representing the search term. If not provided, the function defaults to opening the Alibaba homepage.
Algorithm Steps
- The function begins by retrieving the input parameter
text using the getfuncparams function. If no input is provided, it defaults to 'www'.
- A boolean variable
forcewww is set to true, ensuring that a web page is opened regardless of the input.
- A table
tab is defined, mapping the string 'www' to the Alibaba homepage URL.
- The function uses
sprintfhyperlinktab to format the table into a hyperlink string outstr.
- The function checks if the input
text matches any entry in the first column of tab using contains and find. If a match is found, ind is set to the index of the first match.
- If
forcewww is false and no match is found, or if text is empty, the function prints a message suggesting search terms and exits.
- If a match is found, the corresponding URL from
tab is opened using webTL.
- If no match is found and
forcewww is true, the function constructs a search URL using the input text and opens it with webTL.
Algorithm explaination created using ChatGPT on 2025-08-19 07:17. (Please note: No guarantee for the correctness of this explanation)
Last html export of this page out of FM database by TL: 2025-09-21