A MATLAB Warning Reported by the Code Analyzer — "Newline following comma acts as a row separator."
Jul. 21, 2025 • Updated Aug. 06, 2025
When creating a matrix in MATLAB, we should note that “Newline following comma acts as a row separator.” For example,
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2
3
4
A = [1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, 7, 8];
A
1
2
3
A =
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
Which is equivalent to:
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2
A = [1, 2, 3, 4;
5, 6, 7, 8];
we can see MATLAB Code Analyzer reports a warning message about it:
We can use the “line continuation” operator ...
1 to not make a newline:
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A = [1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, 7, 8];
B = [1, 2, 3, 4, ...
5, 6, 7, 8];
A, B
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2
3
4
5
6
A =
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
B =
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
This point looks very trivial, but it will lead some errors about matrix size if we don’t mention it when coding — actually, recently I spent much time to find an error brought by making a newline but without using ...
.
Besides, the case is the same when omitting commas:
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A = [1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8];
B = [1 2 3 4 ...
5 6 7 8];
A, B
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2
3
4
5
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A =
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
B =
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
References