How to create sequences of vector from a matrix's columns?

Lets say we have a matrix:

      data= [240     7  0.0070   100 
             200    10  0.0095    50 
             220   8.5  0.0090    80 ];

To, create vectors from each columns we usually write

      P1   = data(:,1);
      P2   = data(:,2);
      P3   = data(:,3);
      P4   = data(:,4);

Is it possible initialize P1, P2, P3, and P4 with a loop? I have hundred columns of matrix needed to be vectorized. Thanks everyone.

Answer 1

[Matt J]

While I agree mostly with Dr. Siva Srinivas Kolukula's answer, a compromise is to convert to a cell array,

P=num2cell(data,1);

and access the columns as P{1}, P{2}, etc... This has some advantages, since repeatedly accessing columns using the syntax data(:,i) will trigger repeated memory allocations for the extracted column vectors (at least in some versions of MATLAB). Using cell arrays avoids this.

Answer 2

[KSSV]

Why you want to name them p1,p2,p3 etc when already yu can access them by data(:,1),data(:,2)etc. Naming variable the way you want is called dynamic variable naming. This is not suggested.

More on

https://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/105936-how-to-make-dynamic-variable-names-a1-a2-an-with-for-loop-using-eval-num2str

[Ridho Ibrahim]

Thanks for the info.