Inexplicable behavior of SAVE command

Hi, I have qestion about SAVE command behavior in GUI. In my GUI I use command:

         save rotor_spec; %works fine...saves all variables to rotor_spec.mat

But today I tried make option for user to choose name for the file, not only rotor_spec.mat; I used this:

         name = uiputfile('*.mat') 

         save name; % or save('name')

And it does not work. I do not realy need this for my GUI, but I would like to know, why it does not work.

Answer 1

[John D'Errico]

The one thing you did NOT try was

save(name)

name is a variable, that contains a file name. Use it as such.

When you do this:

save name

MATLAB does create a mat file. The name of that file will be name.mat. Look in your directory.

This happens because MATLAB functions can also be used as commands. When you do so, MATLAB actually passes the string 'name' to the save function, as if you had executed

save('name')

See that this is NOT the same as passing the contents of the VARIABLE name to save. When you use a function as a command, it takes whatever follows the command as literal text, a string, and passes that to your chosen function.

[Jiri Franc]

Thank you for great explanation. I thought I tried this posibility too. Apparently, I should take a break. Thank you once more.

Answer 2

[Adam]

Try:

save( name )

I think the

save name

without the parenthesis only works if name is an absolute string, not a variable e.g.

save 'MyFile.mat'

though I may be wrong.

[John D'Errico]

save name

DOES do something. It DOES work, just that it does something you may not expect. See my answer. This is due to having used the command form of save, as opposed to using the function form of save.

[Jiri Franc]

Thanks, you are right...it works.