MATLAB: Changing name of structures

forstructures

Hi Everybody,
i would like to make a question about the use of structures, i have loaded on workspace a few structures but those have different name, for example structure_portfolio1_prices, structure_portfolio2_prices and so on, i need to make the same operations in all structures so i tried to use a "for" changing the name of the structure something like 'structure_portfolio',num2str(i),'_prices'; but when i try to modifie one of the contents of the structure matlab doesn´t recognize that name as the name of the structure rather just as an string. Thanks a lot

Best Answer

Hello Esteban,
I agree that the naming of these structures is unfortunate. You would be better off structuring your data like so:
data(1).prices = someData;
data(2).prices = someMoreData;
...
data(n).prices = nData;
Or even like this (depending on the content of prices)
prices(1) = someData; % SomeData can be a structure as long as follow-on indexes have same fields
prices(2) = someMoreData; % Must have same fields as index 1
...
prices(n) = nData;
If your data was one level deeper in your structures then you could also take advantage of dynamic field names.
To illustrate dynamic field referencing, let's assume you had your data nested under a parent structure called "data." You would then have fields within data called data.structure_portfolio1_prices, data.structure_portfolio2_prices, and so on. In this case, you could then reference them without resorting to eval, like so:
for idx = 1:10
   tempData = data.(['structure_portfolio' num2str(idx) '_prices']);
   % Do some operation on "tempData"
   ...
end
With dynamic fields, you reference (or create) fields using parentheses.
Hope this helps!
Paul Shoemaker
http://www.matlabinvesting.com
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