How to add variable names for each column when using array2table

I have an array with 7 columns, and want to convert it to a table with certain variable names for each column. Thanks

Answer 1

[David Fletcher]

a=[1 2 3 4 5 6 7;1 2 3 4 5 6 7]

b=array2table(a,'VariableNames',{'col1','col2','col3','col4','col5','col6','col7'})

Answer 2

[Abdul Suleman]

Dear David,

My problem is sligthly different than the one to answered to. In my problem the number of columns is not fixed: may be e.g 3, 5 or 10. I wand to label those columns acccording to their number, which is not fixed. Suppose I have 5 columns in an particular dymanic context. Then I want to use a for statetement to create the labels 'col1', ..., 'col5' and use array2table for these five columns. Can you please help me in this issue?

Thank you for your time.

Best wishes,

Abdul

Answer 3

[Bill Tubbs]

I wrote a function to do it:

function T = array2table_with_name(X, label, sep)
% T = array2table_with_name(X, label) converts the 
% matrix X to a table with custom column labels such
% as 'A1', 'A2', ... etc. if label is 'A' or 'A_1',
% 'A_2', ... etc. if sep (optional) is '_'.
    if nargin == 2
        sep = '';
    end
    assert(numel(size(X)) == 2)
    n_cols = size(X, 2);
    col_names = compose(strcat(label, sep, '%d'), 1:n_cols);
    T = array2table(X, 'VariableNames', col_names);
end

The nice thing about this function is that you can label the columns when X is an expression.

Example:

>> array2table_with_name(X.^2, 'X_sq', '_')

ans =

2×3 table

X_sq_1 X_sq_2 X_sq_3

_______ ______ _________

0.67779 8.3869 3.1085

0.62707 3.0209 0.0029565