Does the solve command in MATLAB not give you an answer?

In a recent blog about the MATLAB solve command, I mentioned that the solve command was not giving us the unique real solution to a physical problem.  A user at MATLAB suggested declaring the syms variable as real, before using the solve command. That worked.  So if the equation in terms of the variable b is eqnb=0, then use

syms b real;
solve (eqnb,b);

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