MATLAB: Concatenate variable value and variable name into new variable name.

Question

I would like to have the name of a variable into another variable name.

So if for example I define

animal = 'cat' and make some calculation: eg. mean. I would like a variable name which concatenates these two: 'cat_mean'.

So if swap to animal = 'dog' there will be created another variable named 'dog_mean'

Best regards Jesper

Answer 1

Why would you want to do this though? A variable name is just a handle used in code. Suppose you create these dynamic variable names. Now everywhere afterwards in the code you have to keep working with these and using ugly code constructs to do so because you can't just refer to a variable properly by its name in the code.

Just use a struct if you want to do something like this e.g.

cat.mean = ...
dog.mean = ...

or if you only want one variable rather than separate ones for cat, dog, etc

animal.type = cat;
animal.mean = ...
animal(2).type = 'dog'
animal(2).mean = ...