Multiple outputs from anonymous function
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I have a function of the following form
function [out1, out2] = demo_fcn( in )
out1 = in(1);
out2 = in(2);
end
which gets called by
[out1, out2] = @(x) demo_fcn(x);
but anonymous functions are not allowed more than one outputs. This is clearly a simplified example, the application is for a nonlinear programming problem where out1 is the objective function and out2 is the gradient calculation. I am not sure how I can structure this differently or in a way which is acceptable by MATLAB syntax.
Note the error messge is
Only functions can return multiple values.
3 Comments
Guillaume
on 10 Dec 2019
So, I'm a bit unclear on what you are asking.
As pointed out by Stephen, anonymous functions can return more than one output (as long as the function delegates the actual processing to a function that returns more than one output).
Yes, some functions such as your demo_fun can't be implemented as an anonymous function since it's made of two statements and anonymous functions in matlab are limited to one non-branching statement. However, you're never forced to use anonymous functions, they're just syntactic sugar that can always be replaced by named functions. You can pass a handle to your demo_fun to fmincon and others, so why can't you use demo_fun as you have written it?
Answers (4)
Pritesh Mody
on 4 May 2022
Edited: Pritesh Mody
on 4 May 2022
The built-in "deal" function allows this. There is an example in the help for deal.
1 Comment
Shengchao Lin
on 30 Jan 2024
+1 on this. There is a documented behavior here:
Star Strider
on 10 Dec 2019
One option is to have the two outputs to one vector, then separate them in a subsequent assignment:
demo_fcn = @(in) [in(1) in(2)];
in = rand(2,1)
Out = demo_fcn(in)
Out1 = Out(1)
Out2 = Out(2)
This works, however I cannot tell if it does what you want it to do.
2 Comments
Star Strider
on 10 Dec 2019
O.K.
The approach I used would clearly not allow concatenation such as that unless the outputs of the two sub-functions were in cell arrays. That adds the additional complication of recovering the double array from the cell array, however that is not diffcult.
I encourage you to experiment with that approach.
gotjen
on 25 Jun 2021
Edited: Walter Roberson
on 4 May 2022
Hey Morten, even though its years later I want to give you my solution to this problem. I use the matlab function disperse ( https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/33866-disperse ) which is availble on the File Exchange but should absoutely become a built in function.
disperse splits arrays into multiple output arguments. You can use it to conveniently get multple outputs from an anonymous function
f = @(x) disperse( [x, 2*x] )
[a, b] = f(1:10)
% a = [ 1 2 ... 10 ];
% b = [ 2 4 ... 20 ];
Nice pet example but lets do something useful with it.
Say we have a structure array, and we want to get the 3rd element from two vector members of that structure. We want to get them out as two arrays
% data is some large data structure we use to pass around parameters for
% our model.
[A, B] = arrayfun( @(s) disperse([ s.wavelength(3), s.absorption(3)]), data);
This one-liner avoids some ugly for-loop when all we want to do is slice our data structure in an unusual way.
1 Comment
Stephen23
on 18 Dec 2022
One-liner without any third party functions:
f = @(x) deal(x, 2*x);
[a, b] = f(1:10)
Renwen Lin
on 18 Dec 2022
try this
@(x1,x2)deal(x1+1,x2+1)
% T2 = grouptransform_easy(T, {'HA','HB'},@(x1,x2)deal(x1+1,x2+1),{'Grade','Name'},["Province","City"]);
0 Comments
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