Re: Accessing information returned from 'dir'

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Oct-2004, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:

| There are two possibilities, and in my opinion, Matlab has chosen the
| wrong one. You *should* be able to make a cross-section in a cell array
| and expect the result to behave like another cell array.

That is what indexing with () is for.  It extracts sub-arrays.  Note
that if only a single element is selected, it is still returned as a
cell array:

  octave:1> x = {1,2;3,4}
  x =

  {
    [1,1] = 1
    [2,1] = 3
    [1,2] = 2
    [2,2] = 4
  }

  octave:2> x(1)
  ans =

  {
    [1,1] = 1
  }

  octave:3> typeinfo (x(1))
  ans = cell

| While on topic, what is the reason for accessing cell arrays with {}?

Indexing with {} returns individual objects.  Note the difference from
the previous example:

  octave:4> x{1}
  ans = 1
  octave:5> typeinfo (x{1})
  ans = scalar

If more than one object is selected by {} indexing, it is returned as
a comma-separated list, which can be used in certain other contexts as
if it were a list of arguments, or a list of elements to construct a
matrix or cell array.  For example,

  sum (x{:})   ## sum elements of X

  [x{:}]       ## same as [x{1}, x{2}, ..., x{end}]

  {x{:}}       ## same as {x{1}, x{2}, ..., x{end}}


jwe



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