Dynamic field names in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Dynamic Field Names in MATLAB Structures

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are organizing information about different fruits and their prices. You want to store this information in a MATLAB structure where each fruit name is a field, and the value is its price.

🎯 Goal: You will create a MATLAB structure with fruit names as dynamic field names and assign prices to each fruit. Then, you will display the price of a specific fruit using dynamic field names.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a structure called fruitPrices with dynamic field names

Use a variable fruitName to hold the name of the fruit

Assign prices to the fields dynamically using fruitName

Display the price of the fruit stored in fruitName

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Dynamic field names help when you want to store data with keys that are not known until the program runs, like user input or data from files.

💼 Career

Understanding dynamic field names is useful for data organization and manipulation in MATLAB, common in engineering and scientific programming jobs.

1

Create an empty structure called fruitPrices

Create an empty structure called fruitPrices to hold fruit prices.

MATLAB

fruitPrices = struct();
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use struct() to create an empty structure in MATLAB.

2

Create a variable fruitName with the value 'apple'

Create a variable called fruitName and set it to the string 'apple'.

MATLAB

fruitPrices = struct();
fruitName = '';
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use single quotes to create a string in MATLAB.

3

Add a field to fruitPrices using fruitName and assign the price 3.5

Use dynamic field names to add a field to fruitPrices with the name stored in fruitName and assign it the value 3.5.

MATLAB

fruitPrices = struct();
fruitName = 'apple';
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use parentheses and dot notation like structure.(variable) to create dynamic field names.

4

Display the price of the fruit stored in fruitName

Write a disp statement to display the price of the fruit stored in fruitName from the fruitPrices structure.

MATLAB

fruitPrices = struct();
fruitName = 'apple';
fruitPrices.(fruitName) = 3.5;
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use disp(fruitPrices.(fruitName)) to display the value.