How to deal with name/value pairs of function arguments in MATLAB

Question

I have a function that takes optional arguments as name/value pairs.

function example(varargin)
% Lots of set up stuff
vargs = varargin;
nargs = length(vargs         


        

Answer 1

There is a nifty function called parsepvpairs that takes care of this nicely, provided you have access to MATLAB's finance toolbox. It takes three arguments, expected field names, default field values, and the actual arguments received.

For example, here's a function that creates an HTML figure in MATLAB and can take the optional field value pairs named 'url', 'html', and 'title'.

function htmldlg(varargin)
    names = {'url','html','title'};
    defaults = {[],[],'Padaco Help'};
    [url, html,titleStr] = parsepvpairs(names,defaults,varargin{:});

    %... code to create figure using the parsed input values
end