Question

Is it possible to declare global variables in MATLAB inside a loop:

cellvar = { 'ni' ; 'equity' ; 'assets' } ;
for i = 1:size(cellvar,1)
    global cellvar{1}  % --> THIS GIVES AN ERROR
end

% Desired result:
global ni
global equity
global assets

Matlab documentation says: “There is no function form of the global command (i.e., you cannot use parentheses and quote the variable names).” Any suggested work-around? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use the EVAL function to do this:

for var = 1:numel(cellvar)
  eval(['global ' cellvar{var}]);
end

Also, since GLOBAL accepts a command-line list of variable names, you could avoid the for loop by using SPRINTF to concatenate your variable names into one string to be evaluated:

 eval(['global' sprintf(' %s',cellvar{:})]);