{"id":2555,"date":"2010-05-07T13:30:59","date_gmt":"2010-05-07T13:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/2010\/05\/07\/putting-variables-back-in-the-base-workspace\/"},"modified":"2010-05-07T13:30:59","modified_gmt":"2010-05-07T13:30:59","slug":"putting-variables-back-in-the-base-workspace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/pick\/2010\/05\/07\/putting-variables-back-in-the-base-workspace\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting Variables Back in the Base Workspace"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jiro<\/a>'s pick this week is PUTVAR<\/a> by John D'Errico<\/a>.\r\n <\/p>\r\n

This is an interesting one. The more I think about it, the more I find it useful. putvar<\/tt> is a simple function for saving local variables to the base workspace, without requiring any output arguments to your function.\r\n It works similarly to assignin<\/tt><\/a>, but it can do multiple variables at once.\r\n <\/p>\r\n

In general, my stance is that I prefer not using commands like assignin<\/tt>, eval<\/tt><\/a>, or evalin<\/tt><\/a> to create variables because there are usually other more programmatically sound ways to achieve the same end goal (cell arrays<\/a>, structures<\/a>, output arguments to a function<\/a>, etc). However, the particular use case John mentions in the HELP resonates with me. When I'm in the debugger, I sometimes\r\n want to save out some of the variables in the function back into the base workspace so that I have them available after I\r\n exit debug mode. Instead of making a bunch of assignin<\/tt> calls for all the variables of interest:\r\n <\/p>

  assignin('base', 'var1', var1)\r\n  assignin('base', 'var2', var2)\r\n  assignin('base', 'var3', var3)\r\n  assignin('base', 'var4', var4)<\/pre>
I can simply make a single call to putvar<\/tt>:\r\n   <\/p>
  putvar(var1, var2, var3, var4)<\/pre>
As usual (and expected), John's code is very well written -- nice help text with examples, extensive comments, error checking,\r\n      and warnings.\r\n   <\/p>\r\n   
Comments<\/b><\/p>\r\n   
Give this a try and tell us<\/a> what you think, or leave a comment for John on the submission page<\/a>.\r\n   <\/p>