Close command and Invalid figure handle

I have a GUI in which I have a button create a plot: p(1)=plot(...).

I have a reset button that, upon being pressed, executes close(p).

When I hit the reset button, I get the error:

??? Error using ==> close at 94
Invalid figure handle.

Error in ==> Pulse>reset_Callback at 870
close(p)

However, while the GUI and p(1) plot figure are open, if I type close(p) in the Matlab Command Window, it closes the figure without any errors. Any idea what's causing this?

Answer 1

[Jan]

Or:

close(ancestor(p, 'figure'))

[Titus Edelhofer]

Interesting, another function that I did not know it exists ;-).

Answer 2

[Titus Edelhofer]

Hi Jared,

you need to close the figure, not the plot. Did you write the GUI using GUIDE? In this case you could write

close(handles.figure1)

assuming you did not assign another tag to the figure ...

Slightly less "nice": just close the figure by

close(gcbf);

where gcbf stands for "get callback figure".

Titus

[Jared]

I phrased my question wrong. p is indeed a figure, with a plot in it. So I may have p(1)...p(5) figures holding plots, and h(1)...h(5) holding histograms. I was just trying to close all of p or all of h.

[Titus Edelhofer]

Hi Jared,

close(p) should work. If they are all figures, all figures should close. There is a problem of course if at least one entry of p is not a figure (because it has been closed e.g. by the user). What you can do is test this during the call by writing close(p(ishghandle(p)))

Titus

Answer 3

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Maybe you are trying to close a figure that is already closed. Use

close(p(1))

[Jared]

Shouldn't close(p) close any of them...p(1), p(2), p(3), etc, that exist? How can I close them in a single command without checking to see which are open? Using close p(1) does indeed work, but I don't see why close(p) doesn't, especially since it does work from the command window.

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

It does not work from command window. Check this

p(1)=figure
p(2)=figure
close(p(1)) % will close figure1
close(p)   % error

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

How p is stored? when you close a figure, you have to update p:

p=handles.p
close(p(2))
p(2)=[]
handles.p=p

Answer 4

[Shashank Prasanna]

I don't recommend this at all, but depending on your use-case they may be useful with modifications:

close(findobj('type','figure'))

Closes every figure. Also as Titus mentioned, there is no such thing as a plot object, there are figures, axes, line objects and so on. Plot returns column vector of handles to lineseries objects.

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/plot.html