How to assign cell arrays to field in nested structure?

Question

Suppose I have a cell array that I want to assign to a nested field.

myArray = {{ 1     2     3     4     5}; 
           { 7     8     9     10    11    12    13}}

I want the endresult to be something like:

myStruct(1).field = { 1     2     3     4     5}
myStruct(2).field = { 7     8     9     10    11    12    13}

Without actually having to access each individual field as I do in the above example. Also, I want to avoid using a for-loop.

Finally, how do we perform the inverse (again without accessing individual fields or using a for-loop): extract myArray from the myStruct structure?

Answer 1

There are two very specific MATLAB functions for this: cell2struct and struct2cell.

For the first conversion, you just have to pay attention to use the correct axis by choosing the correct dim parameter. You have a 2 x 1 cell array here, so it's dim = 2.

For the second conversion, you can just use struct2cell as is.

Here's the complete code:

myArray = {{ 1     2     3     4     5}; 
           { 7     8     9     10    11    12    13}}

myStruct = cell2struct(myArray, 'field', 2);
myStruct(1).field
myStruct(2).field

myArrayAgain = struct2cell(myStruct).'

The output then looks like this (shortened):

  myArray =
  {
    [1,1] =
    {
      [1,1] =  1
      [1,2] =  2
      [...]
    }

    [2,1] =
    {
      [1,1] =  7
      [1,2] =  8
      [...]
    }

  }

  ans =
  {
    [1,1] =  1
    [1,2] =  2
    [...]
  }

  ans =
  {
    [1,1] =  7
    [1,2] =  8
    [...]
  }

  myArrayAgain =
  {
    [1,1] =
    {
      [1,1] =  1
      [1,2] =  2
      [...]
    }

    [2,1] =
    {
      [1,1] =  7
      [1,2] =  8
      [...]
    }

  }

Hope that helps!