Blanks function:

The blanks function will generate a string consisting of n blank characters-that are kind of hard to see here! Though, in a MATLAB if the mouse is moved to highlight the answer in ans, the blanks can be seen.

>> blanks(4)

ans =

>> length(ans)

ans =

4

Generally this function is most helpful when concatenating strings and you want a number of blank spaces in between. For illustration, this will insert five blank spaces in between the words:

>> [first blanks(5) last]

ans =

Bird     house

Showing the transpose of the blanks function can also be used to move the cursor down. In the Command Window, it would appear like this:

>> disp(blanks(4)')

>> 

This is helpful in a script or function to generate space in output, and is basically equivalent to printing the newline character four times.