MATLAB: Structure contains multiple cells with different variables in them I would like to remove variables not present in all cells

anti-patterndynamic fieldnamesevalfieldnamesfieldsslowstructures

my structure (data) contains 1×3 cells horizontally. Each cell inturn contains three 1×1 structures with about 165 variables in each of them (The number of variables is not constant). I am trying to compare all variables names within these cells and then remove variables not present in all cells. This is so I can concatinate all the variables within these cells hoizontally. Below is a piece of code I have written to identify all the fieldnames from a structure called data and then concatenate them vertically. problem arises when there are missing variables, which I would then like to remove if not found on all cells within data.
flds = fieldnames(data{1,1});
for f = 1:size(flds,1)
    out(f,:) = eval(['[data{1,1}.', flds{f} ,' ', 'data{1,2}.', flds{f} ,' ', 'data{1,3}.', flds{f} ,']']);
end

Best Answer

%identify common fields
commonfields = fieldnames(data{1});
for cidx = 2:numel(data)
    commonfields = intersect(commonfields, fieldnames(data{cidx}));
end
%keep only the common fields in each structure
trimmeddata = cell(size(data));
for cidx = 1:numel(data)
    scell = struct2cell(data{cidx});    %convert to cell for easy extraction
    [tokeep, fieldindex] = ismember(fieldnames(data{cidx}), commonfields);  %which rows of cell array to keep and which order to use for commonfields  
    trimmeddata{cidx} = cell2struct(scell(tokeep, :), commonfields(fieldindex(tokeep)), 1);  %convert back into structure
end
merged = [trimmeddata{:}];
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