I have a 1x1 Matlab struct with 5 fields ('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'). Each field contains some sort of data (which doesn't really matter for my question) and I would like to extract each value out of the struct and assign it to a variable named as the field. Any idea for a code that will do it?
3 Answers
assuming s is your structure
cellfun(@(x) assignin('base', x, s.(x)), fieldnames(s));
However, I do not see a good use-case for this as already mentioned by gnovice.
Comments
While it is generally not best practice to spread data out to a bunch of variables when you already have it neatly stored in a structure, an easy way to move structure fields to variables that doesn't require hard-coding your field/variables names would be to use the save and load commands like so:
s = struct('a', 1, 'b', 2, 'c', 3); % A sample structure
save('temp.mat', '-struct', 's'); % Save fields to a .mat file
clear all % Clear local variables (just for display purposes)
load('temp.mat'); % Load the variables from the file
whos % Display local variables
Name Size Bytes Class Attributes
a 1x1 8 double
b 1x1 8 double
c 1x1 8 double
Pro: this is very easy and works for any structure. Con: it involves moving data into and out of a file.
Comments
If you know what are the variables to be created, then you can write (assuming s is your struct):
C = struct2cell(s);
[a,b,c,d,e] = C{:};
Otherwise, you need to create undeclared new variables while the program is running (using the assignin command from @Vahe-Tshitoyan answer) and that's a bad idea.
a = yourStruct.a. And so on for other fields.