How can I extract a word from a vector, instead of a number?
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Marcela Ruiz de Chávez
on 3 Nov 2013
Edited: Marcela Ruiz de Chávez
on 4 Nov 2013
apples=1;
pears=2;
melons=3;
oranges=0;
w=[apples pears melons oranges];
maximum=max(w)
Instead of getting a number, I want to get a word. That is, instead of getting "maximum=3", I want to get "maximum=melons"
Thanks!
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Accepted Answer
Azzi Abdelmalek
on 3 Nov 2013
Edited: Azzi Abdelmalek
on 3 Nov 2013
Create a structure array with name and num fields.
w=struct('name',{'apples' 'pears' 'melons' 'oranges'},'num',{1 2 3 0})
fruit_names={w.name}
fruit_numbers=[w.num]
idx=max(fruit_numbers)
maximum=fruit_names{idx}
10 Comments
Azzi Abdelmalek
on 4 Nov 2013
Change this line
idx=max(fruit_numbers)
to
[idx,idx]=max(fruit_numbers)
More Answers (1)
Walter Roberson
on 3 Nov 2013
You cannot do that with your setup. The "w" you construct only contains values and does not track any history of what variable names were used to construct the numeric vector.
You should have a look at containers.map -- though at the moment I do not know if it can handle 0 as the index.
What I would do would be:
fruitnames = {'oranges', 'apples', 'pears', 'melons'};
w = 0 : (length(fruitnames) - 1);
maximum = fruitnames{ 1 + max(w) };
or
maximum = fruitnames{end};
Note that maximum will end up as a string for this code.
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