directly use results of function

I would like to get 'def' from something like:

(strsplit('abc.def.ghi','.'))(2)

I don't want to do this

r = strsplit('abc.def.ghi','.')
r(2)

is this possible?

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Why you don't want to do?

 r = strsplit('abc.def.ghi','.')
r(2)

Answer 1

[James Tursa]

This has been asked many time on this forum. MATLAB does not support indexing directly into a function result. This is a restriction of the language itself, not just your particular function example. So you will need to use the 2-step approach. Yes, it can clutter up your code a bit, but that's the way it is.

Answer 2

[Daniel]

subsref(strsplit('abc.def.ghi','.'),struct('type','{}','subs',{{2}}))

The subsref function takes two arguments. The first is the data structure (in this case a cell array of strings) and the second is a structure with two fields: type and subs. Type contains the operator which will be used to index the data structure, and the subs field contains the index you want to access.