Iterating through struct fieldnames in MATLAB

Question

My question is easily summarized as: \"Why does the following not work?\"

teststruct = struct(\'a\',3,\'b\',5,\'c\',9)

fields = fieldnames(teststru         


        

Answer 1

You have to use curly braces ({}) to access fields, since the fieldnames function returns a cell array of strings:

for i = 1:numel(fields)
  teststruct.(fields{i})
end

Using parentheses to access data in your cell array will just return another cell array, which is displayed differently from a character array:

>> fields(1)  % Get the first cell of the cell array

ans = 

    'a'       % This is how the 1-element cell array is displayed

>> fields{1}  % Get the contents of the first cell of the cell array

ans =

a             % This is how the single character is displayed