varget

Purpose

Accesses a global variable whose name is given as a string argument.

Format

y = varget(s)

Parameters:

s (string) – the name of the global symbol you wish to access

Returns:

y (any) – contents of the variable whose name is in s.

Examples

alpha = 1;
beta = 2;
letter = "alpha";

// Check to see if a variable named alpha exists
if typecv(letter) == miss(0, 0);
   print letter " does NOT exist";
else;
   // Assign the value of the variable named alpha to 'tmp'
   tmp = varget(letter);
   print "the value of " letter " is: " tmp;
endif;

The code above produces the following output:

the value of alpha is: 1

Remarks

This function searches the global symbol table for the symbol whose name is in s and returns the contents of the variable if it exists. If the symbol does not exist, the function will terminate with an Undefined symbol error message. If you want to check to see if a variable exists before using this function, use typecv().