Structure arrays in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Structure Arrays

📖 Scenario: You are managing a small library system. Each book has a title, author, and year of publication. You want to organize this information using structure arrays in MATLAB.

🎯 Goal: Create a structure array to store information about books, add a filter condition to find books published after a certain year, and display the filtered list.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a structure array called library with fields title, author, and year

Add a variable yearThreshold to filter books published after this year

Use logical indexing to create a new structure array recentBooks with books published after yearThreshold

Display the titles and authors of the filtered books

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Structure arrays help organize complex data like records of books, employees, or products in a clear way.

💼 Career

Many jobs in data analysis, engineering, and research use structure arrays to manage and process grouped data efficiently.

1

Create the structure array library

Create a structure array called library with these exact entries: title as 'The Alchemist', '1984', 'To Kill a Mockingbird'; author as 'Paulo Coelho', 'George Orwell', 'Harper Lee'; and year as 1988, 1949, 1960 respectively.

MATLAB

# Create the structure array library with the given books
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use indexing like library(1).title = 'The Alchemist'; to create each book entry.

2

Add the filter variable yearThreshold

Create a variable called yearThreshold and set it to 1970 to filter books published after this year.

MATLAB

library(1).title = 'The Alchemist';
library(1).author = 'Paulo Coelho';
library(1).year = 1988;
library(2).title = '1984';
library(2).author = 'George Orwell';
library(2).year = 1949;
library(3).title = 'To Kill a Mockingbird';
library(3).author = 'Harper Lee';
library(3).year = 1960;
# Create the variable yearThreshold and set it to 1970
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just write yearThreshold = 1970; on a new line.

3

Filter books published after yearThreshold

Create a new structure array called recentBooks that contains only the books from library where the year field is greater than yearThreshold. Use logical indexing with [library.year].

MATLAB

library(1).title = 'The Alchemist';
library(1).author = 'Paulo Coelho';
library(1).year = 1988;
library(2).title = '1984';
library(2).author = 'George Orwell';
library(2).year = 1949;
library(3).title = 'To Kill a Mockingbird';
library(3).author = 'Harper Lee';
library(3).year = 1960;
yearThreshold = 1970;
# Create recentBooks with books published after yearThreshold
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use recentBooks = library([library.year] > yearThreshold); to filter.

4

Display the filtered books

Use a for loop with variables i to iterate over recentBooks and print each book's title and author in the format: Title: [title], Author: [author].

MATLAB

library(1).title = 'The Alchemist';
library(1).author = 'Paulo Coelho';
library(1).year = 1988;
library(2).title = '1984';
library(2).author = 'George Orwell';
library(2).year = 1949;
library(3).title = 'To Kill a Mockingbird';
library(3).author = 'Harper Lee';
library(3).year = 1960;
yearThreshold = 1970;
recentBooks = library([library.year] > yearThreshold);
# Use a for loop to print title and author of each recent book
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use fprintf('Title: %s, Author: %s\n', recentBooks(i).title, recentBooks(i).author); inside a for loop.