Problem 44397. Determine whether the input is odd, even, or neither.

Created by Harvey Eldridge

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Last Solution submitted on Dec 10, 2022

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Solution 1328039

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2 Comments

yurenchu on 4 Nov 2017

This solution probably doesn't work well for single character inputs though. (For example, when x = 'A'.)

Harvey Eldridge on 7 Nov 2017

Yeah, i've added said solution to the test suite as the question could include any input

Solution 1328026

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8 Comments

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yurenchu on 4 Nov 2017

Why does this not work (while Solution 1328031 does work)?

Peng Liu on 7 Nov 2017

Because a comma separated list cannot be assigned to a single variable, this is how your previous solution catched the assignment error and triggered the catch statement (as desired). However, what you did here is only to generate a comma separated list without any assignment, and thus, no assignment error occurs which cannot trigger the catch statement.

yurenchu on 8 Nov 2017

Thanks, Peng Liu, for your concise explanation! It greatly helps in improving my understanding of cell variables/comma-separated lists as well as the try-catch function and error handling, which are topics that I still find quite complicated; but your comment explains it very clearly and easily! :-)

yurenchu on 8 Nov 2017

However, on closer inspection, I feel there's still something missing in the explanation. If it's merely a matter of failed/absent variable assignment to a comma-separated list, then why does this code still successfully enter into the catch statement in tests #3 and #6 (in which input x is a non-integer number)?

Peng Liu on 8 Nov 2017

For the non-integer test cases #3 and #6, it is the subscript indexing error that was catched in your ans{index} indexing statement (because subscript index has to be either positive integer or logical).

yurenchu on 9 Nov 2017

But in tests #7 and #8 too, the subscript index is neither a positive integer nor a logical value; so why does it not lead to the same subscript indexing error that invokes the 'catch' statement?

Peng Liu on 9 Nov 2017

Tests #7 and 8 involved an 0*0 array [] as the index, which is an extreme case where MATLAB returns nothing without issuing any error. Since no error occurs in the try block, the program flow does not enter the catch block. Hope this helps.

yurenchu on 12 Nov 2017

Thanks, Peng Liu! I would have expected that [] as an index of a cell variable would lead to an error, but apparently MATLAB accepts it and produces a comma-separated list of zero terms (which I now realize is apparently different from an empty matrix, otherwise it would have assigned "ans = [];"). Anyway, again, thanks for your comments, it really helped me understanding MATLAB better!

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Problem 44397. Determine whether the input is odd, even, or neither.

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Problem 44397. Determine whether the input is odd, even, or neither.

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