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How do I obtain all the axes handles in a figure handle? 

Given the figure handle hf, I found that get(hf, 'children') may return the handles of all axes. However, the Matlab Help suggests that it may return more than just the axes handles: 

Children of the figure. A vector containing the handles of all axes, user-interface objects displayed within the figure. You can change the order of the handles and thereby change the stacking of the objects on the display. 

Is there any way to obtain only the axes handle in the figure handle? Or how do I know if the handle returned by get(hf, 'children') is an axe handle?

Thanks!  

allAxesInFigure = findall(figureHandle,'type','axes');

If you want to get all axes handles anywhere in Matlab, you could do the following: 

allAxes = findall(0,'type','axes');

EDIT 

To answer the second part of your question: You can test for whether a list of handles are axes by getting the handles type property: 

isAxes = strcmp('axes',get(listOfHandles,'type'));

isAxes will be true for every handle that is of type axes. 

EDIT2 

To select only axes handles that are not legends, you need to cleanup the list of axes (ax handles by removing all handles whose tag is not 'legend' or 'Colorbar': 

axNoLegendsOrColorbars= ax(~ismember(get(ax,'Tag'),{'legend','Colobar'}))

Matlab provides a convenient way to obtain handles of all the axes within a figure handle using the findall function. Here's how to do it:

1. First, obtain the figure handle using the gcf (get current figure) function. For example, fig = gcf;

2. Next, use the findall function to find all axes within the figure handle. For example, axes_handles = findall(fig,'type','axes');

3. The above step returns an array of handles, one for each axes in the figure. To access each individual axes handle, use indexing. For example, ax1 = axes_handles(1);

4. You can then manipulate properties of each axes using the respective handle. For example, title(ax1,'My First Axes');

In summary, to obtain all the axes handles within a figure handle, you can use the following code: 

fig = gcf;
axes_handles = findall(fig,'type','axes');
for i = 1:length(axes_handles)
    ax = axes_handles(i);
    % Do something with the axes, for example:
    title(ax, sprintf('Axes %d', i));
end

With this method, you can easily manipulate properties of all the axes within a figure and customize their appearance.