Question

I’m trying to tidy up my code. I have an array with 5 columns, each of which is assigned to a variable. At present, I use:

x = inputData(i,1);
y = inputData(i,2);
currentSampleTime = inputData(i,3);
velocityX = inputData(i,4);
velocityY = inputData(i,5);

I thought I could tidy things up a bit by just doing the following:

[x y currentSampleTime velocityX velocityY] = inputData(i,:);

Apparently this does not work. I presume there must be an elegant solution?

Answer 1

If inputData was a cell array then you could do this:

[x y currentSampleTime velocityX velocityY] = deal(inputData{i,:});

However, since you are indexing the row with the variable i can I assume that this is inside a for loop?

If so I would just do the following before the loop?

x = inputData(:,1);
y = inputData(:,2);
currentSampleTime = inputData(:,3);
velocityX = inputData(:,4);
velocityY = inputData(:,5);

Then just use x(i) y(i) etc inside of your loop.

… or depending on how inputData is generated try to create the necessary arrays when reading in or creating inputData.

Also, on a personal note I don’t like using i as a variable in m-code because it can easily get confused with the imaginary number if not properly initialized.