Programming and Data Types

Structures and Cell Arrays

Structures are collections of different kinds of data organized by named fields. Cell arrays are a special class of MATLAB array whose elements consist of cells that themselves contain MATLAB arrays. Both structures and cell arrays provide a hierarchical storage mechanism for dissimilar kinds of data. They differ from each other primarily in the way they organize data. You access data in structures using named fields, while in cell arrays, data is accessed through matrix indexing operations.

This table describes the MATLAB functions for working with structures and cell arrays.

Category	Function	Description
Structure functions	fieldnames	Get structure field names.
	getfield	Get structure field contents.
	isfield	True if field is in structure array.
	isstruct	True for structures.
	rmfield	Remove structure field.
	setfield	Set structure field contents.
	struct	Create or convert to structure array.
	struct2cell	Convert structure array into cell array.
Cell array functions	cell	Create cell array.
	cell2struct	Convert cell array into structure array.
	celldisp	Display cell array contents.
	cellfun	Apply a cell function to a cell array.
	cellplot	Display graphical depiction of cell array.
	deal	Deal inputs to outputs.
	iscell	True for cell array.
	num2cell	Convert numeric array into cell array.

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Applying Functions to Multidimensional Structure Arrays

Structures