matlab-struct

My question is easily summarized as: "Why does the following not work?" teststruct = struct('a',3,'b',5,'c',9) fields = fieldnames(teststruct) for i=1:numel(fields) fields(i) teststruct.(fields(i)) end output: ans = 'a' ??? Argument to dynamic structure reference must evaluate to a valid field name. Especially since teststruct.('a') does work. And fields(i) prints out ans = 'a' . I can't get my head around it. You have to use curly braces ( {} ) to access fields , since the fieldnames function returns a cell array of strings: for i = 1:numel(fields) teststruct.(fields{i}) end Using parentheses

I have a structure with many fields which are vectors of different lengths. I would like to access the fields within a loop, in order. I tried getfield as follows but MATLAB doesn't like that. How can I do this? S = struct('A', [1 2], 'B',[3 4 5]); SNames = fieldnames(S); for loopIndex = 1:2 field = getfield(S, SNames(loopIndex)); %do stuff w/ field end ??? Index exceeds matrix dimensions I'm using structures in the first place because an array would have trouble with the different field lengths. Is there a better alternative to that? Try dynamic field reference where you put a string in the