Issue with "relativeDataPath" option [Windows only]

[kentgens]

My matlab2tikz workflow heavily involves sneaking in Tex macros into matlab2tikz arguments such as 'width', 'height', 'extraAxisOptions', 'relativeDataPath' to control the figure appearance from within my Latex document.

However, I am facing a problem with relativeDataPath. I would like to set this option to \figuredatadir, which is a macro set by my Latex main document. This works well under Linux, but is a problem now as I am switching to Windows. The problem is that under Windows, the backslash \ will be replaced by a forward slash /.

The responsible line is in the internal function TeXpath:

matlab2tikz/src/matlab2tikz.m

Line 462 in cf27b2d

path = strrep(path, filesep, '/');

Currently, I am helping me out with a quite dirty hack by having a function strrep in my workspace which overrides MATLAB's builtin strrep function to avoid patching my copy of matlab2tikz:

% THIS IS A HACK FOR MATLAB2TIKZ
%
% When setting 'relativeDataPath' as a matlab2tikz option, the following
% function comes into play:
%
%     function path = TeXpath(path)
%         path = strrep(path, filesep, '/');
%         % TeX uses '/' as a file separator (as UNIX). Windows, however, uses
%         % '\' which is not supported by TeX as a file separator
%     end
%
% This function prevents to have the Tex command '\figuredatadir' replaced in
% 'relativeDataPath' when runnning under Windows. For Linux or Mac OS, this
% hack is not necessary.
function varargout = strrep(varargin)
    
    [varargout{1:nargout}] = builtin('strrep',varargin{:});
    
    % Different behavior if caller function is "TeXpath" in file "matlab2tikz.m"
    curStack = dbstack();
    if length(curStack)>1 && strcmp(curStack(2).file,'matlab2tikz.m') && strcmp(curStack(2).name,'TeXpath')
        varargout{1} = strrep(varargout{1},'/figuredatadir','\figuredatadir');
    end
end

I am not even sure if the mentioned behavior can be called a bug. If not, I would like to know if there is any better or even recommended way to sneak in Latex commands into relativeDataPath? You may also put this a feature request.

Thank you.