Program Output

Matlab provides different ways to control when and how information is displayed or output to the user. You can enter a command in Matlab and the result of that command is displayed in the command window unless a semicolon ( ; ) is used to suppress the output.

Another more powerful way to display information is with the disp() function. The disp() command accepts a single input value and displays the contents of that input value to the user. You can use the disp() function to:

display a text string
>> disp( 'Hello World' );
Hello World
display just the contents of a variable
>> x = 2.7e-14;
>> disp( x );
  2.7000e-014
display a phrase that includes text and values
>> disp( [ 'The value of x is: ' , num2str(x) ] );
The value of x is: 2.7e-014
display a phrase that includes two text strings and values
>> disp( [ 'The value of x is: ' num2str(x), ...
' and the value of y is ' num2str(y) '.' ] );
The value of x is: 2.7e-014 and the value of y is 3.78e-12.

Note: To display text strings and values, convert the values to strings using num2str() and wrap all in a matrix, as shown.