I want to change the name of elements in a variable

I have a variable name countries, and there are few countries in there; UK, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and United States. How do I change the name 'United States' to 'US' in script?

[Kevin Holly]

Is the variable a string array or cell array?

[John D'Errico]

Do you have a cell array of names, perhaps something like this:

countries = {'UK', 'Canada', 'France', 'Italy', 'Japan', 'United States'}

And now you want to replace 'United States' with 'US'?

In that case, you could simply find the cell with that entry, and then just replace the contents of that cell with the new name.

But what worries me is it also almost sounds like you want to change the names of fields in a struct. And of course that is a totally different process.

[Rik]

And if you named your variables that way: don't. The country name is data. Data should be stored in a variable itself, not in the name.

[Krutik Gamit]

I am new to matlab so I am not sure how I would check if its a string or cell. I was given an excel sheep and I imported the data from there.

[Kevin Holly]

Was there a user interface when you imported the data? If so, there was an option on how to import it. I believe the default is a table. Can you look in the workspace window and tell me what variables you see. It should state the type of variable as well.

[Kevin Holly]

If the country names repeat in an array and you wanted to replace all of the "United States" with "US", you can use strrep .

strrep(Countries,"United States","US")

Answer 1

[Kevin Holly]

You can save a string array with those names as such:

Countries = ["UK";"Canada"; "France";"Italy";"Japan";"United States"];

You can change the 6th element in the array as such:

Countries(6) = "US"

[Krutik Gamit]

I believe I have a cell array not a string

[Kevin Holly]

Then try this:

Countries{6} = "US"