Iterating Over Unique Values in Matlab

Question

I've been trying to follow this answer in order to obtain unique strings from a given cell array. However, I'm running into trouble when iterating over these values. I have tried for loops as follows:

[unique_words, ~, occurrences] = unique(words);
unique_counts = hist(occurrences, 1:max(occurrences));

for a=1:numel(unique_words)
  word = unique_words{a}
  count = unique_counts{a}
  result = result + a_struct.(unique_words{a}) + unique_counts{a}
end

When trying to reference the items like this, I receive the error:

Cell contents reference from a non-cell array object.

Changing the curly brackets to round brackets for unique_couts yields the error:

Reference to non-existent field 'N1'.

Changing both unique_words and unique_counts to round brackets yields:

Argument to dynamic structure reference must evaluate to a valid field name.

How am I to iterate over the results of unique?

Answer 1

unique_words is a cell array. unique_counts is a vector. So unique_words should be accessed using curly brackets and unique_counts using round ones. The error that you are getting in this case is related to the a_struct (which is not defined in the question) not having the corresponding field, not the access method.