Function to convert array of heterogeneous variables to structure (preserving name)

Question

I want to write a function that converts a variable number of variables (in the example below the array sc, the matrix A, the number T) to a structure that contains them. The respective structure labels should be the names of the variables themselves. See example below:

sc=[1 2 1 0.5 0.01 0.03];
A=[1,2,3,4;1,2,3,4];
T=2;

I want my function to do this:

data.sc=sc;
data.A=A;
data.T=T;

so that the output is:

data =

struct with fields:

sc: [1 2 1 0.5000 0.0100 0.0300]
 A: [2×4 double]
 T: 2

for a variable number of heterogeneous arguments.

Answer 1

You can use the function inputname, in combination with dynamic field names.

function outStruct =  dataStructifier(varargin)
    outStruct = struct;
    for k = 1:nargin
        outStruct.(inputname(k)) = varargin{k};
    end
end

This results in:

sc=[1 2 1 0.5 0.01 0.03];
A=[1,2,3,4;1,2,3,4];
T=2;

data = dataStructifier(sc, A, T)

data = 

  struct with fields:

    sc: [1 2 1 0.5000 0.0100 0.0300]
     A: [2×4 double]
     T: 2

Note that the function will cause an error when providing 'nameless variables', for example:

data = dataStructifier(sc, A, T, ones(10))