Renaming cells inside structure from variable in for loop

I have a for loop which it goes through mat files and copy results to put them inside one structure called (level0). This structure has many cells based on the number of the files (e.g 10) and I want to rename them based on variables (dates).

in other words that each cell or fields will have the name with the date and it has inside a structure with these values

dir = 'directory';
filePattern3 = fullfile(dir, 'x*.mat');
mat3 = dir(filePattern3);
name3= {mat3.name}.';

numfiles3 = length(name3);
results3 = cell(numfiles3,1);

dates = [cellfun( @(S) datetime(S([3:9]), 'InputFormat', 'yyMMMdd'), name3, 'uniformoutput',false )];
dates = [cellfun(@datestr,dates,'un',0)];

for K = 1 : numfiles3
   thisfile3 = name3{K};
   datastruct = load(thisfile3);
   xval = [datastruct.x_.coorx.val].';    %extract variable
   yval = [datastruct.x_.coory.val].';
   zval = [datastruct.x_.coorz.val].'; 
   mjd = [datastruct.x_.coorx.mjd].'; 
   t = mjd / 365.2425;
   level0{K}.xval = xval;
   level0{K}.yval = yval;
   level0{K}.zval = zval;
   level0{K}.t = t;
end

Please help me to achieve that, thanks in advance

The dates are

dates = 
    '04-Apr-2002'
    '11-Apr-2002'
    '18-Apr-2002'
    '25-Apr-2002'
    '25-Apr-2002'
    '01-Aug-2002'
    '08-Aug-2002'
    '15-Aug-2002'
    '22-Aug-2002'
    '29-Aug-2002'

[Jos (10584)]

Do not do this! It is the contents of a variable that should be able to change, not its name.

You are way better of storing the date in a field of the structure.

[Mohammed Hammad]

is there a way to achieve that ? because later I would call these values from each cell inside structure to use them for further computations .

[Stephen23]

"because later I would call these values from each cell inside structure to use them for further computations "

Indexing is best. Fieldnames if you really must.

[Mohammed Hammad]

Can you please share similar example for indexing? I am still beginner with these stuff.

Thank you

[Stephen23]

https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/matrix-indexing-in-matlab.html

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/math/array-indexing.html

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/access-data-in-a-cell-array.html

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

You can certainly rename fields dynamically:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/generate-field-names-from-variables.html

But really, it would likely be simpler and more efficient to use indexing and store the dates as data in their own right. Forcing meta-data (such as dates) into things like variable names or fieldnames just makes code slow and fragile. Remember that meta-data is data, and so it deserves to be treated as data and stored in a variable, not forced awkwardly into names of variables or fields:

S(k).X = [...];
S(k).Y = [...];
S(k).date = '2019-01-24';

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/access-multiple-elements-of-a-nonscalar-struct-array.html