Matlab question marks and exclamation points

Random Matlab things I find cool or perplexing. Updated periodically. Some of the comments are very dense, basically just lines of code I will likely forget, but will want to remember at some point.

5/6/13
To check what mfile is currently running, enter mfilename (useful in debug mode).


4/6/13
1. Filtering an image stored in matrix M:

%build the filter to convolve with the image
imFilt=fspecial('gaussian',10,10);
%convolve them
smoothed=imfilter(M,imFilt,'symmetric','conv');

 
2. To change your gridlines to solid grey without changing the colors of the tick labels:

grid
%make gridlines solid
set(gca,'gridlinestyle','-'); 
%make them grey
set(gca,'Xcolor',[.8 .8 .8],'Ycolor',[.8 .8 .8])
%unfortunately, the above changes everything to grey
%copy the axes
c=copyobj(gca,gcf);
%redo them in black. 
set(c,'color','none','xcolor','k','xgrid','off', ...
    'ycolor','k','ygrid','off','Box','off');

8/24/12
If your Windows machine doesn't show the .mat file extension (and you have already unclicked 'Hide extensions for known file types' in your folder options menu) you can fix it within an open folder. First, select Tools->Folder Options->File Types-->New. A GUI to create a new extension will open: type MAT in the field. Then click 'Advanced' and select Matlab Data from the list. It will warn you that this is already associated with a different file type. Accept the change. Problem solved. I stole this simple solution here, and Matlab has a page about it here.

7/9/12
1. If you have a cell array that contains strings, and want to get a numeric array with 1's where a particular string occurs, and 0's otherwise, you can use the cellfun function coupled with strfind: 

>>out=~cellfun('isempty', strfind(cell_array,'string'));

2. Why doesn't the following yield a 1?
>>NaN==NaN


3/24/12
You can use plotyy to display data on different y axes in the same figure. While there isn't presently a scatteryy command (why?), you can try something like the following:

>>[ax,h1,h2]=plotyy(x1,y1,x2,y2);
>>set(h1,'Marker','o');  

Note for older versions of Matlab, you used 'LineStyle' instead of 'Marker'.

2/17/12
1. It would be cool if, on a documentation page for a function, it let you click on a 'function history' link that showed when the function was introduced, and the changes added with each version.

2. Check out the grpstats function. Enter your data, and the group assigned to each data point, and it calculates all sorts of statistics sorted by group (e.g., mean, standard error, standard deviation, etc). I had done this on my own, but their function is better than what I had.

3. Why isn't the following legal?

>>scatter(x,y,'Color',[a b c])

Why must we use CData (and not Color) for scatter plots?