deleting a certain variable in the base workspace via a function
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hi, assume i have the variable x in the base workspace.
I want to delete that variable x via a function. How can I accomplish this?
thanks
3 Comments
Vassilis Lemonidis
on 24 Feb 2022
Design flaws and scripts (workspaces) do not go along in general, so personally I do not consider the above a valid argument. Also, let me reverse the argument. Eg. let's say you have a function saveInChunks that saves a huge variable, created by let's say a matrices product or any other convolved operation, in chunks, to pass it to parfor workers, and then deletes the variable. This cannot be implemented anywhere outside of the main script that creates the variable in the first place. That is a design flaw, of Matlab. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, the only way to handle such a situation is by using evalin , which is an intrinsically unsafe operation, or well, make classes and have to face all the backwards compatibility issues and caveats, without live debugging.
Steven Lord
on 24 Feb 2022
If you've written one function that interacts with a different workspace than its own, what guarantee do you have that you don't have two functions that are both trying to interact with that different workspace? If the first of those functions deletes or modifies data that the second of those functions needs to use, that first function could break the second function (and if it just modifies the data rather than deleting it, that "break" could be a change in the behavior of that second function that gives no indication the behavior has changed rather than an error. Those can be very difficult and time consuming to debug.)
Accepted Answer
per isakson
on 23 Jan 2015
Edited: per isakson
on 23 Jan 2015
Try
evalin( 'base', 'clear(''x'')' )
and simpler
evalin( 'base', 'clear x' )
But take the advice of Image Analyst seriously
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More Answers (2)
Image Analyst
on 23 Jan 2015
That would not be necessary. It's not good practice to have functions messing around with variables in other workspaces than their own.
1 Comment
Sean de Wolski
on 23 Jan 2015
If you need to save something to the base workspace and thus want to clear what's there, look at export2wsdlg. This helps the user not mess anything up.
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