deblank and empty arguments

[Ben Abbott]

On Jan 29, 2008, at 3:34 AM, H. Wziontek wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'd like to propose, that the function deblank should return
> the argument itself instead of an error message if an empty
> value is provided. Sometimes it can happen, that a value is
> not defined, but for some reason, all values are "deblanked"
> inside a loop. A script should not stop in such a case with
> an error. Below my suggestion to change the code.
>
> Hartmut
>
>
> *** deblank.m.orig      Tue Jan 22 17:54:13 2008
> --- deblank.m   Tue Jan 29 09:16:10 2008
> *************** function s = deblank (s)
> *** 34,39 ****
> --- 34,41 ----
>        print_usage ();
>      endif
>
> +   if (!isempty (s))
> +
>        if (ischar (s))
>
>          k = find (! isspace (s) & s != "\0");
> *************** function s = deblank (s)
> *** 51,54 ****
> --- 53,58 ----
>          error ("deblank: expecting string argument");
>        endif
>
> +   endif
> +
>    endfunction
> ______________

I thought I'd compare to Matlab

 >> deblank('')
ans =
      ''
 >> deblank([])
ans =
      []
 >>

Which is consistent with your patch.

Ben