match check in matlab - string

Question

i have strings like these:
s{1,2} = 'string';
s{2,2} = 'string2';
and in workspace structure like this
U.W.string = [2 2.5 3]
I want to check (in loop) s{1,2} or s{2,2} or s{i,2} matches any structure with the same name. If so, assign values from this structure to some variable var(i). How can it be done?

Answer 1

Use isfields to check, if a string is the name of a field in a struct. Then use the syntax struct.(name), where name is a string to access the field. Your code might look something like:
test = struct('hello', 'world', 'count', 42, 'mean', 10);
fields = {'test', 'count';
'hello', 'text';
'more', 'less'};
values = {pi, 'dummy', -1};
for row = 1 : size(fields, 1)
for column = 1 : size(fields, 2)
if isfield(test, fields{row, column})
test.(fields{row, column}) = values{row};
end
end
end
This converts the initial struct
test =
hello: 'world'
count: 42
mean: 10
to this one
test =
hello: 'dummy'
count: 3.1416
mean: 10
A shorter implementation is achieved by removing the inner loop and giving a cell-array to isfields:
for row = 1 : size(fields, 1)
%# Note the parenthesis instead of curly braces in the next statement.
match = isfield(test, fields(row, :));
if any(match)
test.(fields{row, match}) = values{row};
end
end

Answer 2

Use isfield(structName,fieldName). This should do the trick:
strings{1,1} = 'foo';
strings{1,2} = 'bar';
strings{1, 3} = 'foobar';
U.W.foo = 1;
U.W.foobar = 5;
for idx = 1:length(strings)
if(isfield(U.W,strings{1,idx}))
expression = sprintf('outvar(idx) = U.W.%s',strings{1,idx});
eval(expression);
end
end