engGetVariable crashes after MATLAB has quit

When using the MATLAB Engine interface, if the MATLAB process quits, engGetVariable(ep, "name") simply crashes (at least on OS X it does).

What is the best way to deal with this problem?

The only solution I can see is to do

 engEvalString(ep, "")

to test whether MATLAB is still running before each single engGetVariable(). Is there a better way? I wish engGetVariable were smart enough to handle this situation and just return NULL if MATLAB is not running.

[Samuel Gray]

you could run a test string against the Matlab workspace pointed to by the engine pointer

sprintf(tststr,"whos('myvar');\n") (or ~exists('myvar','var'))

engEvalStr(tststr...)

getBuffer (I forget the exact call)

get the console buffer string and see if it has the variable that you're looking to copy with GetVariable