MATLAB Easiest way to assign elements of a vector to individual variables

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How do I do multiple assignment in MATLAB?

So let's say I have a vector p = [1 2 3]. I want a command that looks like this:

[x y z] = p;

so that x = p(1), y = p(2), and z = p(3).

Is there an easy way to do this?

Duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2740704/is-there-anything-like-deal-for-normal-matlab-arrays, which is itself a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2337126/multiple-assignment-in-matlab — mtrw, May 23 '10 at 21:02

score 29 · Accepted Answer · answered May 23 '10 at 20:54

29

Convert to cell array.

pCell = num2cell(p);
[x,y,z] = pCell{:};

answered May 23 '10 at 20:54

Jonas

74,690
10
137
177

Well, looks like this is the best I can do. – rlbond May 23 '10 at 21:19
Why defining pCell at all: [x,y,z] = num2cell(p){:}; – Philipp Jun 24 '18 at 18:27
@Philipp: In which version of Matlab can you do that? Octave has the feature, but Matlab doesn't have it (yet) – Jonas Jun 25 '18 at 13:49
@Jonas You are so right. I am currently only using octave and I am not aware of the small differences. – Philipp Jun 25 '18 at 19:00
@Philipp: No problem. Agreed that chain-indexing would really be nice. – Jonas Jun 26 '18 at 13:35

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 23 '10 at 21:05

2

You can use deal:

[x y z] = deal( p(1), p(2), p(3) )

answered May 23 '10 at 21:05

Nicholas Palko

813
3
11
21

12

Well, that's just as verbose as `x = p(1); y = p(2), z = p(3)` – rlbond May 23 '10 at 21:18

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 23 '10 at 21:20

Well, turns out there's no way to one-line this, so I wrote a function.

function varargout = deal_array(arr)
    s = numel(arr);
    n = nargout;

    if n > s
        error('Insufficient number of elements in array!');
    elseif n == 0
        return;
    end

    for i = 1:n
        varargout(i) = {arr(i)}; %#ok<AGROW>
    end
end

MATLAB Easiest way to assign elements of a vector to individual variables

3 Answers3

Linked

Related