Giving a variable name as a function input and obtaining its value as an output

Question

I have lots of variables in the workspace in MATLAB and I have to create some statistics through a function. I need to enter the name of the variable as a function input and I need to return its value in the function and then process it.

varName='Sa'
function [ someStatistics ] = AnalyzeThis (varName);

So, in this AnalyzeThis function, I need to obtain the value of Sa (which is a one-dimensional array). How can I do that?

gnovice · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-17 18:00:54Z

4

Short answer: use evalin:

function someStatistics = AnalyzeThis(varName)
  varValue = evalin('caller', varName);
  % Do stuff with varValue
  ....
end

Longer answer: you shouldn't really be designing your code to depend on functions like evalin (such as "evil" eval). Instead of having a whole bunch of variables with different names in your calling workspace, store the data in structures, which can be easily accessed by field names.

edited Sep 17, 2018 at 18:00

answered Sep 17, 2018 at 17:54

gnovice

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