Can I convert a symbol that is a product of products into an array of products?
I tried to do something like this:
syms A B C D;
D = A*B*C;
factor(D);
but it doesn't factor it out (mostly because that isn't what factor is designed to do).
ans =
A*B*C
I need it to work if A B or C is replaced with any arbitrarily complicated parenthesized function, and it would be nice to do it without knowing what variables are in the function.
For example (all variables are symbolic):
D = x*(x-1)*(cos(z) + n);
factoring_function(D);
should be:
[x, x-1, (cos(z) + n)]
It seems like a string parsing problem, but I'm not confident that I can convert back to symbolic variables afterwards (also, string parsing in matlab sounds really tedious).
Thank you!
Use regexp on the string to split based on *:
>> str = 'x*(x-1)*(cos(z) + n)';
>> factors_str = regexp(str, '\*', 'split')
factors_str =
'x' '(x-1)' '(cos(z) + n)'
The result factor_str is a cell array of strings. To convert to a cell array of sym objects, use
N = numel(factors_str);
factors = cell(1,N); %// each cell will hold a sym factor
for n = 1:N
factors{n} = sym(factors_str{n});
end