How can I pass a variable to a function with the variable name and data visible to the function without passing both a string and a data variable separately in MATLAB 7.0 (R14)?

I want to pass a variable to a MATLAB function with the variable name and data visible to the function without passing both a string and a data variable separately in MATLAB.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

You can accomplish this by using the EVALIN function. As an example, if you want to write a function to plot a workspace variable and set the plot title to the name of the variable, you could use the following function:

function plotname(name)

% where name is passed as a string

data = evalin('base',name);

plot(data)

title(name)

an example of using this code from the MATLAB command prompt is below:

myData = 1:10;

plotname myData  %can also use plotname('myData')

This will plot the data contained in "myData" and set the title of the plot to be "myData".