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I would like to comapre two arrays of strings how could I affect the following values to a,b,c,d , when I try as below, I got an error 

[a,b,c,d] = getVal(x);
    =>this will gives :
a =

a
b=

0
c =

10
d =
[]

and I have : 

expected = {'a','0','10',[]};

how could I make the comparison between [a,b,c,d] and expected ?

talonmies
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lola
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    possible duplicate of [How do I do multiple assignment in MATLAB?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2337126/how-do-i-do-multiple-assignment-in-matlab) – Li-aung Yip May 10 '12 at 12:32
  • I've updated my question by ginving values – lola May 10 '12 at 13:02

2 Answers2

2

Mistake 1:

= is the assignment operator.

The comparison operator is ==.

Mistake 2:

MATLAB arrays don't generally hold strings. They hold numbers or single characters.

>> b = ['a','0','10','20']

b =

a01020

To see why [a,b,c,d] = ['a','0','10','20'] doesn't work, consider this:

>> [a,b,c,d] = 'a01020'
??? Too many output arguments.

You're trying to put six characters into four buckets. Not going to work.

You might have meant to create a cell array:

>> c = {'a','0','10','20'}

c = 

    'a'    '0'    '10'    '20'

Matlab arrays are numerical matrices, not general-purpose list containers.

Li-aung Yip
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  • what I want to do is to affect each string to a value from table – lola May 10 '12 at 12:27
  • @lola - Can you post the exact text of the error you are getting? Also, if you want to show values in a column rather than a row, then do c' (the apostrophe ' means transpose) – kitchenette May 11 '12 at 04:08
2

Following on from Li-aung's answer, what you probably want is something like

isequal({a,b,c,d}, {'a', '0', '10', '20'})

This will return true iff a has the value 'a' and so on.

EDIT

To perform multiple assignments, you can use DEAL

[a,b,c,d] = deal('a', '0', '10', '20')
Edric
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