How to call a Matlab function in Python from matlab.engine using the user's input (variable of type string) as the name of the function?

Question

I have a Matlab function name as a string (the variable name is 'function_name'), which is an input from a user, and I need to somehow call that function from Python. Below you can see how I was trying to call this function using the variable name, but it exited with the following error: (<class 'matlab.engine.MatlabExecutionError'>, MatlabExecutionError("Undefined function 'chsn_agthm' for input arguments of type 'uint8'.\n"), <traceback object at 0x0000015D14323C00>)

import matlab.engine
eng = matlab.engine.start_matlab()
res = eng.function_name(input1, input2, nargout=2)

You might try res = eng.feval( function_name, input1, input2, nargout=2), with function_name being a string of an existing MATLAB function. I cannot test myself, so if it is working, feedback would be welcome. — user16372530
– user16372530, Commented Sep 20, 2022 at 19:21

user16372530 · Accepted Answer · 2022-09-20 20:20:22Z

3

The problem is that function_name needs to be a statement in the python code, but is given as string. To resolve this, my suggestion would be not to call function_name directly, but to always call MATLAB's feval function with function_name as first input argument, i.e.

res = eng.feval( function_name, input1, input2, nargout=2)

feval is then called by the MATLAB engine and invokes the function with the name function_name using the other arguments (apart from nargout=2) as input.

For further information on feval please have a look at https://de.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/feval.html.

Alternative approach:

It might also be possible to construct a string that contains a valid python expression including function_name and then to call this expression using pythons eval().

edited Sep 20, 2022 at 20:20

answered Sep 20, 2022 at 20:10

user16372530

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