#cell array

[risingfalling]

[sageagainstthemachine-blog]

MATLAB: Unpack cell array to function arguments

I recently found myself needing to pass the contents of a variable length cell array as arguments to a function that accepted a variable number of arguments (via Matlab's varargin functionality).  I thought this would be a real problem, but was astonished at how easy it was.

Assuming we have a cell array defined as follows:

my_cell_array = {'You', 'Say', 'Aloha', 'I', 'Say', 'Aloha'};

And that we're trying to call Matlab's load() function with the following form:

load(filename, varargin)

All we have to do is the following:

load('some_random_matlab_file.mat', my_cell_array{:})

And that's all it takes.  Just in case you're curious, the particular use case that led me to need this functionality was that I needed to load a list of user specified variables from a .mat file in a toolbox I'm working on.