In MATLAB, what ASCII characters are allowed to be in a function name?

Question

I have a set of objects that I read information out of that contain information that ends up becoming a MATLAB m file. One piece of information ends up being a function name in MATLAB. I need to remove all of the not-allowed characters from that string before writing the M file out to the filesystem. Can someone tell me what characters make up the set of allowed characters in a function name for MATLAB?

Answer 1

Legal names follow the pattern [A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]*, i.e. an alphabetic character followed by zero or more alphanumeric-or-underscore characters, up to NAMELENGTHMAX characters.

Since MATLAB variable and function naming rules are the same, you might find genvarname useful. It sanitizes arbitrary strings into legal MATLAB names.