How to write an exponent in an axis label when the matlab syntax doesn't work?

The matlab syntax for writing an exponent in an axis label is

ylabel('e^t')

but when I try to do this on my figure I get the following error:

>> ylabel('e^t')

Warning: Error updating Text.

String scalar or character vector must have valid interpreter syntax:

e^t

Instead of getting an exponent, my axis label shows 'e^t' How do I resolve this issue?

[Dyuman Joshi]

Seems to be working here for this particular case.

Could you please share your code and mention which version of MATLAB you have?

fplot(@exp)
ylabel('e^t')

[Brianna Miranda]

This is my code and I am using MATLAB 2023b.

t = -5:.01:5;

x = exp(t/10);

figure(1)

scatter(x,t,24,'filled')

xlabel('t')

ylabel('e^(t/10)')

[Dyuman Joshi]

Try this -

t = -5:.01:5;
x = exp(t/10);
figure(1)
scatter(x,t,24,'filled')
xlabel('t')
ylabel('e^{(t/10)}')

[Stephen23]

Note that with TeX and LaTeX curly braces are used as to group characters together.

This is shown in the YLABEL documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/ylabel.html?s_tid=srchtitle_site_search_1_ylabel#buiyzbx-1_sep_shared-Interpreter

and also explained here:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/creating_plots/greek-letters-and-special-characters-in-graph-text.html

[Brianna Miranda]

It still gives the error with or without using the curly braces

[Brianna Miranda]

I still get the same warning and on my plot it includes the curly braces in the text.

String scalar or character vector must have valid interpreter syntax:

e^{(t/10)}

[Stephen23]

ylabel('e^t')

What MATLAB version are you using?

Please show the exact code that you are calling.

Please show the complete output of this command:

which ylabel -all

[Steven Lord]

Do you receive that error running just that one line of code? Or can you only reproduce it with more lines (hopefully just a few lines)? Please post a small and self-contained example that you can run (in a fresh session of MATLAB, newly started) that produces the warning.

xlabel('e^{(t/10)}')

The one thing I'm thinking of that might cause this with just that line of code is if you've change the default Interpreter property for text objects first.

f = figure;
set(f, 'DefaultTextInterpreter', 'LaTeX')
xlabel('e^{(t/10)}')

Warning: Error updating Text.

String scalar or character vector must have valid interpreter syntax:
e^{(t/10)}

In that case try wrapping that label text in $.

f = figure;
set(f, 'DefaultTextInterpreter', 'LaTeX')
xlabel('$e^{(t/10)}$')

Answer 1

[Brianna Miranda]

I decided to just uninstall and reinstall matlab and that fixed the problem