MATLAB: Naming individual fields in a struct

field namesstruct

Hi everyone,
I have this block of code:
HWFiles = {'midas_wind_197901-197912.txt',............'midas_wind_201301-201312.txt'};
for k=1:numel(HWFiles);                                                                                                                             
    fid = fopen(HWFiles{k}, 'r');                                                                                                                  
    tmp = textscan(fid,'%s %*s %*f %*f %*s %*f %f %*f %f %f %f %f %f %*f %*f %*f %*f %*f %*f %*f %*f %*s %*f', 'Delimiter',',');                  
      HWData(k).data = tmp ;                                                                                                                         
      fclose(fid);
  end
Not pasting well sorry. HWData becomes a 1 x 35 struct and I wanted to change each field name to the year from the file, eg 1979, 1980 …. 2013. Any ideas with this?

Best Answer

Are you asking to create a structure of length 1, HWData, with field names 1979, 1980, and so on? If so then you cannot do that as field names must start with a letter. If you wanted to be able to look up by year then you could use a common prefix such as 'Y', so Y1979, Y1980, and so on. Or you could use containers.map
TO use the prefix,
prefix = 'Y';
and in the loop,
filename = HWFiles{k};
underpos = find(filename, '_', 1, 'last');
fieldname = [prefix filename(underpos+1:underpos+3)];
HWData.(fieldname) = tmp;
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