MATLAB: Looping over table variable to access structure

Question

Dear All,

Suppose you have a table and structure of the following format

 A     code  size       
 obs1  an      10
 obs2  bg       8
 obs3  cf       5

and a structure:

 structurename.an
 sturcturename.ag
 sturcturename.cf

containing some stuff. Assume code is unique and any codes in the table are also part of the structure. I would now like to access the first n structure variables by size defined in table. So for example the first largest to I want matlab to take "an" and "ag" and then compute something with it. What is the best way to loop through tables?

Thanks in advance!

Best

Answer 1

1. Sort your table by decreasing size:

tsorted = sortrows(t, 'size', 'descend');

2. Simply iterate over the rows and use dynamic field names to access your structure:

for row = 1:n
  val = structurename.(sortedt{row, 'size'});
  %do something with val
end