Passing Function results to another function

I recently ran into some behavior I though was unintuitive - given the code below, nargin prints out 1. Why isn't the second argument being passed to test2? Is there a standard way to get around this issue?

test2(test())
1

function [a,b] = test( )
a=5;
b=6;
end
function  test2( a,b)
nargin
end

Answer 1

[Matt J]

Multiple output arguments must be explicitly requested and assigned:

 [A,B]=test;

 test2(A,B)

or

 [AB{1:2}]=test;
 test2(AB{:}),

[Matt J]

or you could return your arguments in a vector

function ab = test( )
 ab=[5,6]
end

function  test2( ab)
 numel(ab)
end

[Walter Roberson]

Right. This is a design feature of MATLAB, that when it sees that the result of a function is being passed to another function, all but the first output is discarded. This is fairly tricky to get around (I did see someone find a way once using deal() but I'm not convinced it would work.)