How to search through entirety of one field of a structure

Hi all,

This is an issue I've been grappling with for a little while. It has workarounds, but I'd like to know if it can be done directly.

I often find myself with structs such as those that are returned from the "dir" command, where the struct is a nx1 struct array with several fields.

Let's say n = 10. My question is, how can I access all 10 names in that listing at once without using a for loop? And while I'm asking, is there also a way to write a 10x1 struct in this fashion without a for loop? I've been using workarounds using the for loop such as:

n=10;
lazyNames={'a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i','j'};

% Workaround iterative write solution
for i = 1:n
    filesListing(i).name = lazyNames{i};
end

% Workaround iterative read solution
for i = 1:n
    ithName{i} = filesListing(i).name;
end

But there has to be a more efficient way to perform this action, right?

The only way I've ever seen to write multiple entries into a struct at once is like this:

% Workaround matrix write solution
listing.lazyFieldName(1:10)=zeros(10,1);

And writing multiple at once doesn't seem to work at all in this fashion:

% Workaround matrix read solution
a(1:10)=listing.lazyFieldName(1:10);

But that's not quite the same structure format.

Thanks for your help!

[Stephen23]

The general solution is to use comma-separated lists:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/comma-separated-lists.html

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/1656435-tutorial-comma-separated-lists-and-how-to-use-them

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

filesListing = struct('name', lazyNames);     %writing
ithName = {filesListing.name};                %reading

You can also

[filesListing(1:length(lazyNames)).name] = lazyNames{:};