Why does passing a list of securities that contains duplicates to BLP.HISTORY cause an error in R2011b?

I get error upon retrieving data from Bloomberg using the HISTORY command. The list of assets is loaded from list.mat as follows:

load('list.mat');

c = blp;

data = history(c,list,'LAST PRICE','8/01/99','8/10/2011','daily');

I expected the variable data to contain 42 cells with historical price (there are 42 assets in the list). Instead I get the following error:

 In an assignment  A(I) = B, the number of elements in B and I must be the same.

 Error in blp/history (line 277)

     outInd(i) = find(strcmp(s(i),sec));

 Error in testblp_master (line 10)

 data = history(c,list,'LAST PRICE','8/01/99','8/10/2011','daily');

The same script works fine in R2010b and I obtain the data as expected. I would like to know how I can solve this issue.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

The error occurs because you are passing a list of securities that contains duplicates. The BLP.HISTORY method now sorts the output data. When the function tries sorting the data based on the order of your input list, it is finding duplicate entries in some cases. You can solve this problem by using the following code:

load('list.mat');

list = unique(list);

c = blp;

data = history(c,list,'LAST PRICE','8/01/99','8/10/2011','daily');