How do I specify number format in a plot axis in Matlab R2015a?

I have a plot in Matlab R2015a which defaults to having y-axis labels formatted in exponential notation.

As standard practice I like to go in and reformat the axis labels to have consistent precision (which is an unfortunate shortcoming of pre-2016 plots). I do this as follows:

function fixaxislabels( xfrmt,yfrmt )
%fixaxislabels redefines the x and y axis labels to have consistent 
% precision IAW xfrmt and yfrmt
xlabel=get(gca,'XTickLabel')
for i=1:numel(xlabel)
    xval=str2num(xlabel{i});
    xlabel{i}=num2str(xval,xfrmt);
end
ylabel=get(gca,'YTickLabel')
for i=1:numel(ylabel)
    yval=str2num(ylabel{i});
    ylabel{i}=num2str(yval,yfrmt);
end
xlabel
ylabel
set(gca,'XTickLabel',xlabel);
set(gca,'YTickLabel',ylabel);

However, this only recognizes the actual labels and returns labels between 1.000 and 10.000 rather than 0.001 and 0.010.

How do I force my axis labels to be fixed point notation before I normalize the label precision?

Answer 1

[Rik]

Maybe you should get the actual values, instead of the labels. That would save you a conversion from string to number and solve this problem.

xlabel=get(gca,'XTick');%returns a vector

Edit: you can do this directly by setting the format for your ticklabels. But alas, this function was introduced in R2016b, so your release doesn't have it.

xtickformat(xfrmt)