Unable to unclude special characters in the value of a parameter

Hi Guys,

I am adding a block to a pre loaded simulink system. After adding the block i need to set a specific parameter to this block of the name P and value being a dynamic value. I am using:

    p = add_block('uupilib/Get data from PI-point', [par, '/', nam], 'Position', pos);

    set_param(p, 'P', ['Pin(', num2str(i), ')']);

However, when i'm trying to change this to:

    p = add_block('uupilib/Get data from PI-point', [par, '/', nam], 'Position', pos);

    set_param(p, 'P', Pin(i).PITag);

It says "Unexpected MATLAB expression". From what i've discovered it seems that the value Pin(i).PITag contains special characters such as semi colon(;) and spaces( ). When I replace this entire string with a simple 'abc', it works again. Is there a way that i can ask MATLAB to escape these special characters?

This statement is in a loop and i here is the loop counter variable.

Answer 1

[A Jenkins]

It used to be called genvarname().

It looks like in newer versions you are supposed to use matlab.lang.makevalidname().

I suppose you could also use regular expressions to escape only the characters you don't want.

[Nikhil Jones]

Well, i went through makevalidname and i guess i specifically need the function which replaces special characters with their hexadecimal representations. But I need to decode this string when i'll be reading the block parameter from the other functions. How do i do that?

[A Jenkins]

For the built in examples of how to do the replacement yourself, type doc regexprep.

There are also some people here who enjoy these puzzles for some strange reason. I bet if you put an example up (before and after of what you would like the string to be), someone would write the regular expression for you.