How can I make mlint return all the variable names in my .m-file?

My function 'calc_energy' gets the data table 'T' as input, calculates 'T.Energy' and then returns 'T'.

function [ T ] = calc_energy( T )
T.Energy = T.Power .* T.Time;
end

Now I want to write function

check_required_variables( T, 'calc_energy.m' )

that checks whether 'T' actually contains 'T.Power'. Therefore 'check_required_variables' needs to recognize all the variables used in 'calc_energy', since it doesn't know which variable to look for.

I've come across 'mlint', which I only see warning about undefined variables the are also declared in my code. This shows however that MATLAB is capable of recognizing variables before compiling. How can I make mlint return a list of all the variable names occuring in my .m-file?

Answer 1

[Rik]

Maybe they will change this in later releases, but currently m-lint can't detect possibly missing structure fields. I suspect this is because it can be tricky to see if a dot is object.method or structure.field. What you can do for structures is using the fieldsnames function to get a list of all the first level field names. A better idea is to use isfield. The latter is what I use when parsing a struct in a function.

[Jonas Brocksieper]

Thanks! That might be an easier and safer way

Answer 2

[Adam]

You should just be able to use e.g.

ismember( 'Energy', T.Properties.VariableNames )
ismember( 'Power', T.Properties.VariableNames )

within your function and wrap an assert around them or whatever you want to do on finding out if they exist or not.

[Jonas Brocksieper]

Thanks!