retrieve legend icon property from existing legend

hi all,

in the documentation to legend (R2014b) it says

   [h,icons,plots,str] = legend(___) %additionally returns the objects used to create the legend icons, the objects plotted in the graph, and an array of text strings.

for a new legend the icons object can be changed like

icon(i).MarkerSize=25;

if you know wich i you have to refer to. i want to alter the appearance of legend markers in an existing figure that i saved in a fig file. i do not want to plot it all anew. is there any more elegant way to retrieve an existing icons object than this one:

l=findall(gcf,'tag','legend');
[lh,ic,~,~]=legend(l.String,'Interpreter',l.Interpreter,'FontSize',l.FontSize,...
  'TextColor',l.TextColor,'Units',l.Units,'UserData',l.UserData,'FontWeight',l.FontWeight,...
  'Position',l.Position,'Color',l.Color,'Box',l.Box,'FontName',l.FontName,...
  'Location',l.Location,'LineWidth',l.LineWidth);  % transfer all properties from existing legend
delete(l)
i=findall(ic,'Type','Line'); % reduce to lines
for m=1:length(i)    % change properties
        i(m).MarkerSize=25;
end

thanks, Fabian

[Fabian]

i dont know why this did not work in yesterday's Matlab session (i tried that, sure), but the solution worked today and is as simple as can be:

[lh,ic]=legend;

with ic the legend icon object where one can then find the line objects as posted above

[Fabian]

well using my function again on a plotyy-generated graph i was unable to return the icons in any way.

legend(axis) % with axis handle to where the legend is set

the lh was returned, but ic was empty...