How to use an entry in an array to call a different array entry

Question

I've looked at a few other questions but I couldn't come up with an answer, I'm relatively new to MatLab (but not programming) so I apologize if it's a duplicate.

I'm sure the title isn't very clear so here's an example:

I have an array, say name = ['Jack';'Jill'];. The elements in this array reference other arrays, such as:

Jack.income = 31000;
Jack.car = 1;
Jill.income = 55000;
Jill.car = 0;

Now, I would like to use name to pull data from the other arrays, such as:

data = name(1).income, which should return 31000, or data = name(2).car, which should return 0.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much,

Eric

Dan · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-31 09:01:41Z

1

You'd be better off using an array of structs (or making your own person object perhaps):

people(1).name = 'Jack';
people(1).income = 31000;
people(1).car = 1;
people(2).name = 'Jill';
people(2).income = 55000;
people(2).car = 0;

Now you can generate a list of names like this (see cell arrays and comma separated lists):

names = {people.name};

which you can convert into an index like this (see logical indexing and ismember):

ind = ismember(names, 'Jack');

and then finally extract someone's income:

people(ind).income

answered Dec 31, 2014 at 9:01

Dan

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1 Comment

soupault Over a year ago

Agreed. By the way, structed array is the fastest container datatype (in the sense of often element extraction/recording). Neither tables, not cell arrays are good.

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