\nFor me, when I want to find a function nine times out of ten, I’ll go to the “Function Reference” (“Functions – By Category” in earlier versions) section of the MATLAB documentation:<\/p>\n
![\"Function](\"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/images\/desktop\/michael_katz_browsing_vs_searching\/doc_small.jpg\")
<\/div>\nTab completion<\/strong> Searching is browsing’s non-linear cousin: the search engine sifts through information to find the thing you’re looking for. There’s a few ways to go about searching for functions, each provides its own powers and flexibility but requires good querying skills to narrow down the results.<\/p>\n MATLAB documentation<\/strong> You also have two documentation search options from the command line docsearch<\/tt><\/a> which performs the same search as the help browser search bar, and displays the results in the help browser, and lookfor<\/tt><\/a> which searches the H1 lines of all the m-files in your path. The first time you run this will be the slowest as it will have to search your path. Lookfor<\/tt> and docsearch<\/tt> might give different results depending how comprehensive the H1 line of the M-file is. lookfor<\/tt> will also search your own m-files if they are on the path.<\/p>\n Google<\/strong> While we’re on the Google topic, you can search the whole internet for text in M-files using Google’s codesearch, again just append lang:matlab<\/tt> to the search to just search M-files.<\/p>\n Find Files<\/strong> We have many great new features in the pipeline to enhance both browsing and searching. In the meantime tell us how you go about finding new functions to use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of our big team efforts is making information in MATLAB more accessible. When figuring out how to the present and teach new features, we often wind up at the “browsing versus… read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,11,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3470,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions\/3470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAs we previously described<\/a>, you can use tab completion to find all functions that start with a particular letter (“sl” is a good bet for simulink functions) or to find methods of an object after a period “.”.<\/p>\n
\nYou can search in the help browser’s search bar. Once you understand the documentation’s literary style you can find things quite effectively. We previously blogged about how to narrow the search results<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nOf course, you can always use Google’s search engine to search our online documentation<\/a>. Just append site:https:\/\/www.mathworks.com\/access\/helpdesk\/help<\/tt> to your search to narrow the results to the MATLAB doc.<\/p>\n
\nWhen you want to search your own non-internet based code, you can use Find Files. We previously discussed Find Files in this post<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Function](\"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/images\/desktop\/michael_katz_browsing_vs_searching\/find_small.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\n