Loop through specific strcuture field names

I would like to loop through specitifc feild names of my struct. At the moment the field names are typed out individually for each entry in "names" like this (variable names are more descriptive in the real code):

names={'di','da','du','bi','ba','bo','fi','fa','fu','fe'};

[R{i}.di_Beat,R{i}.di_R_med,R{i}.di_D_med,R{i}.di_R_m,...
    R{i}.di_D_m]=Cut(L{i}.di_F,S_start{i},S_length{i},ts{i},1,'g');

Currently I just rewrote these two lines of code for each entry of name, this would be the next two lines for example:

[R{i}.da_Beat,R{i}.da_R_med,R{i}.da_D_med,R{i}.da_R_m,...
    R{i}.da_D_m]=Cut(L{i}.da_F,S_start{i},S_length{i},ts{i},1,'g');

The field names do not appear all one after another so i can just pull out the names. I tried to concatenate teh variable names as a string unsing strcat but that did not work out. I did something along the linnes of:

for n=1:length(names)
    Beat=strcat('R{i}.',names{n},'_Beat');
    R_med=strcat('R{i}.',names{n},'_R_med');
    D_med=strcat('R{i}.',names{n},'_D_med');
    R_m=strcat('R{i}.',names{n},'_R_m');
    D_m=strcat('R{i}.',names{n},'_D_m');
    Signal=strcat('L{i}.',names{n},'_F');
    
    [Beats,R_med, D_med, R_m, D_m]=Cut(Signal,S_start{i},S_length{i},ts{i},1,'g');
end

This still seems too compliocated and I am looking for an easier way to do this.

Any help is highly appreciated!

[Stephen23]

It seems that you are putting some kind of meta-data into the fieldnames, and are now starting to find out why that is a bad way to write code. Putting meta-data into fieldnames (or variable names) makes code complex, slow, and buggy. Read this to know why:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/225435-save-variable-as-string-from-user-input

As far as I can tell, your code would be much simpler if you replaced the fieldnames (with meta-data) and the non-scalar cell array with one non-scalar structure:

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

S(r,c).Beat = ...
S(r,c).Rmed = ...
S(r,c).Dmed = ...
...
S(r,c).meta = ... di/da/du/...

[SH]

Hi Stephen,

Yes I agree that putting meta-data into field names is everything else but ideal. The script itself and all functions that it is calling were written by a different person. It would be too much effort to change the entire architecture of the variables and all scripts and functions which call them, so I am just trying to improve the code in some places to make it more readable.

So taking the variable outline as a given, do you have any idea how to approach the issue above?

Thanks for your help.

[Jos (10584)]

This would only propagate badly written code ... so, my answer would be no.

Answer 1

[James Tursa]

As Stephen says, this is going to be slow. But maybe this syntax using dynamic field names would be useful to you:

R{i}.([names{n},'_Beat'])
etc.

[SH]

Thank you James! That's exactly what I was looking for.