best practice for multi-selection listbox

After the user selects some entries from a listbox, what is the "matlab" way of creating an array that will have all the selected items? There is, of course, the straightforward procedural approach of building it of the array that is returned, and there is a way of building a boolian array with "1" at the selected entries (by looping over the returned array) and than doing something like:

FileList=FileList(BoolArray>0)

which is working allright, but I have a strong feeling there is a better way of doing it with MATLAB, since that "looping over the returned array" seems to be crying to be changed.

BTW, in the above example trying to use the boolian array without the ">0" - i.e. FileList=FileList(BoolArray) - generates a syntax error, which is probably avoidable somehow...?

[Jan]

If you mention an error, please post the complete message.

[Josh]

Right... FileList=FileList(BoolArray) gives:

"Subscript indices must either be real positive integers or logicals."

Answer 1

[Adam]

Just getting the string property from the list box and applying logical indexing based on the listbox's value seems a perfectly natural way of doing this.

e.g.

h = uicontrol( 'Style', 'listbox', 'max', 10, 'Units', 'normalized', 'Position', [0.1 0.1 0.8 0.8], 'String', { 'option1', 'option2', 'option3', 'option4' } )

h.String( h.Value )
ans = 
    'option2'
    'option4'

after selecting 2 and 4.

It is true though that uicontrols are not especially friendly, with the same base for all different types of uicontrol with properties interpreted in different ways and some (e.g. SliderStep) just blatantly irrelevant in almost all cases!

Answer 2

[Jan]

See FEX: GetSelection

[Josh]

Good to know, thanks, I might use it. Adam's answer is exactly what I was looking for, though (one line of code, huh!).