Indexing a cell array in a table

When I have a table where one of the variables is a cell array, indexing using curly brackets into that column does not seem to work as expected.

myCell = {'a';'b';'c';'d';'e'};
myTable = table(myCell)
isequal(myCell{1},vertcat(myTable.myCell{:})) % Should be false, but returns true
isequal(vertcat(myCell{:}),vertcat(myTable.myCell{:})) % Should be true, but returns false

It seems to me that using curly brackets to index into a cell array returns only the first cell indexed.

isequal(myTable.myCell{2:3},myCell{2}) % returns true

This seems like a bug, or am I missing something?

Answer 1

[Debarati Banerjee]

When you try to access contents of multiple cells, MATLAB creates a comma-separated list. Because each cell can contain a different type of data, you cannot assign this list to a single variable. However, you can assign the list to the same number of variables as cells. MATLAB assigns to the variables in column order.

Check the following link for more information:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2014a/matlab/matlab_prog/access-data-in-a-cell-array.html

Modifying the code as

myCell = {'a';'b';'c';'d';'e'};
myTable = table(myCell)
isequal(myCell{1},vertcat(myTable.myCell)) 
isequal(vertcat(myCell),vertcat(myTable.myCell))

seems to work.