Dynamic Field Names

(Originally posted on Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials blog.)

We have MATLAB users come into The MathWorks to present their work in MATLAB from time to time. Recently there was an interesting presentation with some really great "Clutter classification" algorithms in a GUI. One of the questions that came out of that discussion was how to get rid of a bunch of EVAL statements from their code. The following code shows how they can be avoided using "dot parens notation", or Dynamic Field Names as they are formally known.

a.doug = 'Hull'

a.jiro = 'Doke'

name = 'doug';

last = a.doug

eval(['last = a.' name]) %BAD

last = a.(name) %GOOD