Structures and field access in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Structures and Field Access in MATLAB

📖 Scenario: You are working on a simple contact list application. Each contact has a name, phone number, and email address. You want to store this information using MATLAB structures.

🎯 Goal: Create a MATLAB structure to hold contact information, add a configuration variable to select a contact, access the fields of the selected contact, and display the contact details.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a structure array called contacts with exactly three contacts.

Each contact must have fields name, phone, and email with exact values.

Create a variable called selectedIndex to choose which contact to display.

Use field access to get the selected contact's details.

Print the selected contact's name, phone, and email exactly as specified.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Structures are useful to organize related data like contact lists, product catalogs, or student records in MATLAB.

💼 Career

Understanding structures and field access is important for data organization and manipulation in engineering, data analysis, and scientific computing jobs.

1

Create the contacts structure array

Create a structure array called contacts with three contacts. The first contact has name 'Alice', phone '123-456-7890', and email '[e-mail]'. The second contact has name 'Bob', phone '234-567-8901', and email '[e-mail]'. The third contact has name 'Charlie', phone '345-678-9012', and email '[e-mail]'.

MATLAB

% Create the contacts structure array with three contacts
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the syntax contacts(index).field = value; to create each contact.

2

Add a selectedIndex variable

Create a variable called selectedIndex and set it to 2 to select the second contact.

MATLAB

contacts(1).name = 'Alice';
contacts(1).phone = '123-456-7890';
contacts(1).email = '[e-mail]';
contacts(2).name = 'Bob';
contacts(2).phone = '234-567-8901';
contacts(2).email = '[e-mail]';
contacts(3).name = 'Charlie';
contacts(3).phone = '345-678-9012';
contacts(3).email = '[e-mail]';

% Create selectedIndex variable and set it to 2
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Just write selectedIndex = 2; on a new line.

3

Access the selected contact's fields

Create three variables called selectedName, selectedPhone, and selectedEmail. Assign them the name, phone, and email fields of the contact at index selectedIndex in contacts.

MATLAB

contacts(1).name = 'Alice';
contacts(1).phone = '123-456-7890';
contacts(1).email = '[e-mail]';
contacts(2).name = 'Bob';
contacts(2).phone = '234-567-8901';
contacts(2).email = '[e-mail]';
contacts(3).name = 'Charlie';
contacts(3).phone = '345-678-9012';
contacts(3).email = '[e-mail]';

selectedIndex = 2;

% Assign selectedName, selectedPhone, and selectedEmail from contacts(selectedIndex)
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use dot notation with contacts(selectedIndex) to get each field.

4

Display the selected contact's details

Write three disp statements to print the selected contact's details exactly as follows:
Name: Bob
Phone: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

MATLAB

contacts(1).name = 'Alice';
contacts(1).phone = '123-456-7890';
contacts(1).email = '[e-mail]';
contacts(2).name = 'Bob';
contacts(2).phone = '234-567-8901';
contacts(2).email = '[e-mail]';
contacts(3).name = 'Charlie';
contacts(3).phone = '345-678-9012';
contacts(3).email = '[e-mail]';

selectedIndex = 2;

selectedName = contacts(selectedIndex).name;
selectedPhone = contacts(selectedIndex).phone;
selectedEmail = contacts(selectedIndex).email;

% Display the selected contact's details using disp
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use disp(['Label: ' variable]) to print each line.