how to convert a table to vectors where each vector takes the name of the column in the table

if I have a table T where each column has a header, how can i convert the table to vectors where each vector takes the respective name in the table? so if the table has 3 columns abc,xyz, wzt . how can I generate vectors that are called abc,xyx,and wzt. (it is a sample example but my table is much larger )

[Stephen23]

"how can I generate vectors that are called abc,xyx,and wzt"

Although popular with beginners, doing this makes code slow, buggy, hard to read, difficult to debug, and has other disadvantages:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/304528-tutorial-why-variables-should-not-be-named-dynamically-eval

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

Assuming you're are talking about matlab tables. What would be the advantage of going from an easy, clear, debugger and optimiser friendly way of referencing columns to a more complicated, slow, bug-prone dynamically named individual variables?

You can already access your individual vectors as

tablename.xyz
tablename.abc

Why can't you continue to do so?

In other words, don't do it. Yes, it's possible but there's no advantage and plenty of downsides (the editor won't be able to see syntax errors, the code will run slower because the optimiser won't be able to tell what is going on, the code will be longer, etc.)

[Viktor G.]

But what if I don't know which variables will I need, so I want to be able to choose late on with the input option? Wouldn't it be better if I just imported the table as separate column vectors?

Answer 2

[Adam]

Why would you need your vectors named that? How are you planning to work with these vectors afterwards given that their names come from a table rather than simply being hard coded into the program so that you can actually refer to them.

Use a struct if you really need to do this e.g.

s.( header1 ) = ...
s.( header2 ) = ...

then if header1 = 'abc' and header2 = 'xyz' you will end up with a struct containing fields abc and xyz which you can later refer to in the same way.

I don't use tables so I don't know off-hand the specifics of extracting headers and columns from them, but I assume you know that. I could look it up and try out on my command line, but then you can also do that so there'd be no point me doing it!

[Peter Perkins]

table2struct(t,'ToScalar',true) will do that, but honestly, there's little reason to want to. As Guillaume points out, tables provide the same "dot-varName" syntax as a scalar struct, plus a lot more.