Question

Assume I have the function:

function name_the_paramlist(varargin)
    % Print out varargin exactly how it is called as a string

Basically what I want it to do is, calling:

name_the_paramlist({'x', x}, y, 1, 'hello', [1, 2; 3, 4])

should print to the screen the string:

'{''x'', x}, y, 1, ''hello'', [1, 2; 3, 4]}'

Any suggestion?

ETA: The reason I want something like this is to hopefully resolve this question:
Matlab – how to create a subclass of dataset class keeping the dataset parameter constructor

Answer 1

Well, if you type this function call in a command line or run with F9 (so it get saved in the history) you can read the history.m file and get the last command as a string.

fid = fopen(fullfile(prefdir,'history.m'),'rt');
while ~feof(fid)
    lastcmd = fgetl(fid);
end
fclose(fid);

Then get the argument part:

arg_str = regexp(lastcmd, '\w+\((.+)\)','tokens','once');
arg_str = strrep(arg_str{:},'''','''''');

UPDATE:

Another idea. If you call this function from another script or function (m-file) you can use DBSTACK to return the m-file name and the current line number:

SI = dbstack;
filename = SI(end).file;
lineNo = SI(end).line;

Then you can follow similar technique as in the first solution to read that line from the m-file and get argument part.

In opposite to the first solution this won’t work if run from command line or editor cell mode.