MATLAB Object-Oriented Programming

Overloading the disp Function

In this section...

“Display Methods” on page 18-42

“Overloaded disp” on page 18-42

“Relationship Between disp and display” on page 18-42

Display Methods

Subclassing matlab.mixin.CustomDisplay is the best approach to customizing object

display. However, if you do not derive your class from matlab.mixin.CustomDisplay,

overload the disp function to change how MATLAB displays objects of your class.

MATLAB calls the display function whenever an object is referred to in a statement that

is not terminated by a semicolon. For example, the following statement creates the

variable a. MATLAB calls display, which displays the value of a in the command line.

a = 5

a =

5

display then calls disp.

Overloaded disp

The built-in display function prints the name of the variable that is being displayed, if

an assignment is made, or otherwise uses ans as the variable name. Then display calls

disp to handle the actual display of the values.

If the variable that is being displayed is an object of a class that overloads disp, then

MATLAB always calls the overloaded method. MATLAB calls display with two

arguments and passes the variable name as the second argument.

Relationship Between disp and display

MATLAB invokes the built-in display function when the following occur:

18 Customizing Object Display