Accessing within a matlab function a string that duplicates the command that called the function.

Apologies for the horrible question title. It's easiest if I give an example of what I'm trying to ask. Suppose I have a function f that takes a lot of optional arguments. I might call it as follows:

f(x,'dog',1,'cat',2,'cow',3)

Presumably matlab retains a record of the string I just typed, because it has to pass it as a string to the history.m file. I'd like to be able to save this string to a mat file from within f, so that I can remember the exact way that I called f, and thus duplicate the rest of the data that's saved in the mat file.

Of course, I could reconstruct the string myself, building from varargin, etc, but this would be really messy, especially if the function call involved both optional and non-optional arguments.

Thanks!

[Walter Roberson]

When you are talking about "from within f" are you referring to when you are debugging ?

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Perhaps the diary command will work, but I'm not sure if it will record the command as soon as it enters the function, or only after it has exited the function.

[Leo Simon]

You'd have to remember to open the diary before you called the function. Which unfortunately I'd forget to do, just when I really needed to know what the call was

[Image Analyst]

How can you forget? I just told you. Just type it in

delete(filename);
diary(filename);
f(x,.......
delete(filename); % Now get rid of it if you want it to be temporary.

Inside the f function:

fid = fopen(filename);
% read file with fgetl() or whatever, then exit.

Or you can just use fprintf() to print the input arguments to the command line or a file. Note: like I said, I don't know if the diary will contain the information at that point - you might have to wait until f exits.