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The "DisplayName" option for the plot function Should support string array input

cui,xingxing on 26 Jan 2025 (Edited on 26 Jan 2025)
Latest activity Reply by Adam Danz on 27 Jan 2025

Currently, according to the official documentation, "DisplayName" only supports character vectors or single scalar string as input. For example, when plotting three variables simultaneously, if I use a single scalar string as input, the legend labels will all be the same. To have different labels, I need to specify them separately using the legend function with label1, label2, label3.
Here's an example illustrating the issue:
x = (1:10)';
y1 = x;
y2 = x.^2;
y3 = x.^3;
% Plotting with a string scalar for DisplayName
figure;
plot(x, [y1,y2,y3], DisplayName="y = x");
legend;
% To have different labels, I need to use the legend function separately
figure;
plot(x, [y1,y2,y3], DisplayName=["y = x","y = x^2","y=x^3"]);
Error using plot
Value must be a character vector or a string scalar.
% legend("y = x","y = x^2","y=x^3");

6 Comments

Adam Danz
Adam Danz on 27 Jan 2025
Thanks for sharing your thoughts @cui,xingxing. Here a workaround that doesn't require a loop but does require a second line of code.
x = (1:10)';
y1 = x;
y2 = x.^2;
y3 = x.^3;
figure;
h = plot(x, [y1,y2,y3]);
set(h, {'DisplayName'}, {"y = x";"y = x^2";"y=x^3"})
legend
Star Strider
Star Strider on 26 Jan 2025
I usually do something like this —
x = (1:10)';
y{1} = x;
y{2} = x.^2;
y{3} = x.^3;
DN = ["x" "x^2" "x^3"];
% Plotting with a string scalar for DisplayName
figure
hold on
for k = 1:numel(DN)
plot(x, y{k}, DisplayName="y = "+DN(k));
end
hold off
legend(Location='best')
% % To have different labels, I need to use the legend function separately
% figure;
% plot(x, [y1,y2,y3], DisplayName=["y = x","y = x^2","y=x^3"]);
% % legend("y = x","y = x^2","y=x^3");
.
cui,xingxing
cui,xingxing on 27 Jan 2025
I don’t like loop annotations; it would be better if vectorized annotations were supported.
Rik
Rik on 27 Jan 2025

I'm on mobile so I can't test it, but wouldn't something with deal() work if you're se on avoiding loops?

Rik
Rik on 26 Jan 2025

I would prefer a string array to result in multiple lines.

Is there any other of the Name Value pairs that already works like you suggest?

cui,xingxing
cui,xingxing on 27 Jan 2025
No, I haven't encountered it yet.

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