MATLAB: Is any change ‘DisplayName’ property in plot function

'displaynamer2014bgraphics

plot(x,y,'DisplayName',{'name1','name2','name3','name4'})
produce error
Error using plot
Value must be a string.
This shall produce this plot with curve names.
Is any change in 'DisplayName' property in plot function?

Best Answer

When we were rebuilding all of the graphics objects as MATLAB Objects, we found they they had several different variations of code that parsed this cell array case. You'll find in older versions of MATLAB that some variations of this will work for some objects, but not for others.
We wanted to unify this code so that all of the objects worked the same way. That way you wouldn't have to learn the differences between the different objects. But we couldn't come up with one version that replicated all of the existing variations. This particular case was one of the casualties.
The simplest workaround here is to use the set command, because it works the same for all objects. In this case, the following should work in any version of MATLAB.
h = plot(magic(3));
set(h,{'DisplayName'},{'first';'second';'third'})
legend show
If you look carefully at this, you'll notice some important points.
  • The property name is also in a cell array.
  • The cell array of values is the same shape as the array of handles.
This is the canonical form of this cell array 'dealing' syntax. It's the one that the various plotting commands were trying to match. But most of them were slightly different from this.
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