Question

I would like to sort elements in a comma-separated list. The elements in the list are structs and I would like the list to be sorted according to one of the fields in the struct.

For example, given the following code:

 L = {struct('obs', [1 2 3 4], 'n', 4), struct('obs', [6 7 5 3], 'n', 2)};

I would want to have a way to sort L by the field ‘n’. Matlab’s sort function only works on matrices or arrays and on lists of strings (not even lists of numbers).

Any ideas on how that may be achieved?

Thanks,

Micha

Answer 1

I suggest you do this in three steps: Extract ‘n’ into an array, sort the array and consequently reorder the elements of the cell array.

%# get the n's
nList = cellfun(@(x)x.n,L);

%# sort the n's and capture the reordering in sortIdx
[sortedN,sortIdx] = sort(nList);

%# use the sortIdx to sort L
sortedL = L(sortIdx)