Comparison operators in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Comparison operators

📖 Scenario: You are working in a store that sells fruits. You want to check which fruits have prices less than or equal to a certain budget.

🎯 Goal: Create a MATLAB script that uses comparison operators to find which fruits are affordable within a given budget.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary (containers.Map) called fruitPrices with exact entries: 'apple' = 3, 'banana' = 1, 'cherry' = 5, 'date' = 2

Create a variable called budget and set it to 3

Use a for loop with variables fruit and price to iterate over fruitPrices.keys and check prices using comparison operators

Create a logical array called affordable that stores true for fruits with price less than or equal to budget

Print the names of fruits that are affordable using disp

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Stores and shops often need to filter products based on price limits to help customers find affordable options.

💼 Career

Understanding comparison operators and data structures like dictionaries is essential for data filtering and decision-making in programming jobs.

1

Create the fruit prices dictionary

Create a containers.Map called fruitPrices with these exact entries: 'apple' = 3, 'banana' = 1, 'cherry' = 5, and 'date' = 2.

MATLAB

% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use containers.Map with two cell arrays: one for keys and one for values.

2

Set the budget variable

Create a variable called budget and set it to 3.

MATLAB

fruitPrices = containers.Map({'apple', 'banana', 'cherry', 'date'}, [3, 1, 5, 2]);
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 3 to the variable budget.

3

Check which fruits are affordable

Use a for loop with variable fruit to iterate over fruitPrices.keys. Inside the loop, get the price of each fruit from fruitPrices. Create a logical array called affordable that stores true if price is less than or equal to budget, otherwise false.

MATLAB

fruitPrices = containers.Map({'apple', 'banana', 'cherry', 'date'}, [3, 1, 5, 2]);
budget = 3;
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use fruitPrices.keys to get all fruits, then loop with an index. Compare each price with budget using <=.

4

Display affordable fruits

Use a for loop with index i to iterate over affordable. Inside the loop, if affordable(i) is true, use disp to print the fruit name from keysList{i}.

MATLAB

fruitPrices = containers.Map({'apple', 'banana', 'cherry', 'date'}, [3, 1, 5, 2]);
budget = 3;
keysList = fruitPrices.keys;
affordable = false(1, length(keysList));
for i = 1:length(keysList)
    fruit = keysList{i};
    price = fruitPrices(fruit);
    affordable(i) = (price <= budget);
end
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Loop over affordable and print fruit names where the value is true.