workspace

create and manipulate variable names in the target workspace by using strings

Description

Now and then people want to load a file and assign them to a variable name with a meaning that reflects the data.

Up now Matlab users have many but two choices:
- using EVAL (evil)
- put the data burried inside a structure

Here is a third choice:

ws=workspace % class constructor
datastr='data1';
ws.(datastr)=load([datastr '.txt'])
plot(data1);

% Easy? No?

I'm almost sure there will be many protests to this submission.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.3 (R2006b)

[us]

bruno, not REALLY a third choice: this snippet simply uses EVALIN in its core engine...
hence, (admittedly a lot of good work for) something that should not be supported on first place...
us

[Bruno Luong]

Hi us,

Thank you for your comment. In depth, despite of your note, there are two advantages of the code and it is totally fair to compare WORKSPACE with EVAL IMHO:

First: Within the WORKSPACE methods evalin is used for the sole purpose of retrieving the value of variable(s) from the workspace. Never evalin is evaluated with the RHS (statement with '=' sign').

Second: From the user point of view, he/she does not to worry about building EVAL with full statement. Expressions are evaluated directly, and no longer through string (except for the variable name) as with EVAL.

Bruno

[Bruno Luong]

Originally the WORKSPACE was developed under Matlab 2008B.
I (the author) have upgraded and tested the new version of the package (27 Jan 2009) for backward compatible to 2006B (tested under 2006B, 2007A, 2008B, and 2009A-prerelease). The workspace used the object-oriented programming (OOP) introduced officially by The Mathworks since 2008A. The file uses undocumented OOP feature and Java hashing for backward compatible.
I will be graceful if users of this package can report any eventual incompatible issue with previous versions.