Why are the results of the size function different from the whos function Size?

Why are the results of the size function different from the whos function Size?

Here is an example:

>> excelstring = strfind('ABC DUMP.txt','.xls')

excelstring =

     []

>> size excelstring

ans =

     1    11

>> whos excelstring Name Size Bytes Class Attributes

excelstring      0x0                 0  double

Answer 1

[James Tursa]

Doing this:

size excelstring

Is equivalent to doing this:

size('excelstring')

Whenever you invoke a function without the parens, the remainder of your inputs are taken to be literal string(s).

[Matt Fig]

As described here:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/syntax.html

This is called command-function duality.

Answer 2

[the cyclist]

Because the syntax for what you wanted is

>> size(excelstring)

Looks like your syntax is giving the size of the string 'excelstring', rather than that of the variable named excelstring.

[Chirag Gupta]

To explain further, size excelstring is equivalent to asking MATLAB to compute size('excelstring').

MATLAB takes the arguments as strings if they are not passed in parenthesis ()