Find Column Number in Table

I would like to subset a table into columns before a certain variable and columns after that variable. Is there a way to locate a column number within a table? Is there a more clever way to do this?

load patients
BloodPressure = [Systolic Diastolic];
T = table(Gender,Age,Smoker,BloodPressure,'RowNames',LastName);
A = *findColNumber*(T, 'Age'); % Some function that will locate the column number of 'Age'.
T1 = T(:, 1:A);
T2 = T(:, A+1:end);

'patients' is a standard example data set included in R2014a. Entering the command 'load patients' should load the relevant data.

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Mohammad Abouali]

Table variable have property fields

you can use that to find the column number like this

find(strcmpi(T.Properties.VariableNames,'Age'))

ans =

       2

[Image Analyst]

Cool - I didn't know about that. You taught me something. Of course he still won't be able to do what he wants to do (I tried).

[Mohammad Abouali]

load patients
BloodPressure = [Systolic Diastolic];
T = table(Gender,Age,Smoker,BloodPressure,'RowNames',LastName);
A = find(strcmpi(T.Properties.VariableNames,'Age'));
T1 = T(:, 1:A);
T2 = T(:, A+1:end);

Strange. This works for me.

And I have learned also a lot from your posts and your matlab examples.

[Image Analyst]

Yeah, your T is slightly different than mine. No time now, but tomorrow I'll have to investigate why your code and mine behave differently and have slightly different T's. You'd think they should be the same even though they were gotten in different ways.

Actually I just figured it out. With my code, load() returns T as a structure not a table. So that makes sense.

[Robot]

Thanks for the help!

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

You don't need the column number. Just do

ages = T.Age;

[Robot]

Thanks for the response, however T.Age will return the values within column 'Age'. I am looking for the column number for 'Age' (IE: A = 2).

[Image Analyst]

You can get the age column like this:

T = load('patients')
ageColumn = find(ismember(fieldnames(T), 'Age'))

[Image Analyst]

Actually T is a structure, so I recommend Mohammad's way.