7 Variables

Variables let you give names to values and refer to them later. You have already seen variables in many of the examples. The name of a variable must be a sequence of letters, digits and underscores, but it may not begin with a digit. Octave does not enforce a limit on the length of variable names, but it is seldom useful to have variables with names longer than about 30 characters. The following are all valid variable names

x
x15
__foo_bar_baz__
fucnrdthsucngtagdjb

However, names like __foo_bar_baz__ that begin and end with two underscores are understood to be reserved for internal use by Octave. You should not use them in code you write, except to access Octave’s documented internal variables and built-in symbolic constants.

Case is significant in variable names. The symbols a and A are distinct variables.

A variable name is a valid expression by itself. It represents the variable’s current value. Variables are given new values with assignment operators and increment operators. See Assignment Expressions.

There is one built-in variable with a special meaning. The ans variable always contains the result of the last computation, where the output wasn’t assigned to any variable. The code a = cos (pi) will assign the value -1 to the variable a, but will not change the value of ans. However, the code cos (pi) will set the value of ans to -1.

Variables in Octave do not have fixed types, so it is possible to first store a numeric value in a variable and then to later use the same name to hold a string value in the same program. Variables may not be used before they have been given a value. Doing so results in an error.

Automatic Variable: ans

The most recently computed result that was not explicitly assigned to a variable.

For example, after the expression

3^2 + 4^2

is evaluated, the value returned by ans is 25.

: isvarname (name)

Return true if name is a valid variable name.

See also: iskeyword, exist, who.

: varname = genvarname (str)

: varname = genvarname (str, exclusions)

Create valid unique variable name(s) from str.

If str is a cellstr, then a unique variable is created for each cell in str.

genvarname ({"foo", "foo"})
  ⇒
     {
       [1,1] = foo
       [1,2] = foo1
     }

If exclusions is given, then the variable(s) will be unique to each other and to exclusions (exclusions may be either a string or a cellstr).

x = 3.141;
genvarname ("x", who ())
  ⇒ x1

Note that the result is a char array or cell array of strings, not the variables themselves. To define a variable, eval() can be used. The following trivial example sets x to 42.

name = genvarname ("x");
eval ([name " = 42"]);
  ⇒ x =  42

This can be useful for creating unique struct field names.

x = struct ();
for i = 1:3
  x.(genvarname ("a", fieldnames (x))) = i;
endfor
  ⇒ x =
     {
       a =  1
       a1 =  2
       a2 =  3
     }

Since variable names may only contain letters, digits, and underscores, genvarname will replace any sequence of disallowed characters with an underscore. Also, variables may not begin with a digit; in this case an ‘x’ is added before the variable name.

Variable names beginning and ending with two underscores "__" are valid, but they are used internally by Octave and should generally be avoided; therefore, genvarname will not generate such names.

genvarname will also ensure that returned names do not clash with keywords such as "for" and "if". A number will be appended if necessary. Note, however, that this does not include function names such as "sin". Such names should be included in exclusions if necessary.

See also: isvarname, iskeyword, exist, who, tempname, eval.

: namelengthmax ()

Return the MATLAB compatible maximum variable name length.

Octave is capable of storing strings up to 2^{31} - 1 in length. However for MATLAB compatibility all variable, function, and structure field names should be shorter than the length returned by namelengthmax. In particular, variables stored to a MATLAB file format (*.mat) will have their names truncated to this length.