6.1.5 Processing Data in Structures

The simplest way to process data in a structure is within a for loop (see Looping Over Structure Elements). A similar effect can be achieved with the structfun function, where a user defined function is applied to each field of the structure. See structfun.

Alternatively, to process the data in a structure, the structure might be converted to another type of container before being treated.

 
: c = struct2cell (s)

Create a new cell array from the objects stored in the struct object.

If f is the number of fields in the structure, the resulting cell array will have a dimension vector corresponding to [f size(s)]. For example:

s = struct ("name", {"Peter", "Hannah", "Robert"},
           "age", {23, 16, 3});
c = struct2cell (s)
   ⇒ c = {2x1x3 Cell Array}
c(1,1,:)(:)
   ⇒
      {
        [1,1] = Peter
        [2,1] = Hannah
        [3,1] = Robert
      }
c(2,1,:)(:)
   ⇒
      {
        [1,1] = 23
        [2,1] = 16
        [3,1] = 3
      }

See also: cell2struct, namedargs2cell, fieldnames.

 
: c = namedargs2cell (s)

Create a cell array of field name/value pairs from a scalar structure.

Example:

s.Name = "Peter";
s.Height = 185;
s.Age = 42;

c = namedargs2cell (s)
  ⇒ { "Name", "Peter", "Height", 185, "Age", 42 }

See also: struct2cell.