Creating a structure and fields in nested loops

I'm extracting information from a large Exel sheet, it has headers 'category, 'item', 'variety', 'date', 'price', 'unit'; the 'item' header contains fruits and vegetables, and 'variety' contains the different varieties, and 'item' and 'variety' columns are the only 2 concerned in this task.

I'm trying to create a structure with field names 'apples', 'pears', 'carrots, 'cabbage' and for each field it contains an array of distinct varieties of the corresponding item, so it looks something like:

structure=

apples: [distinct varieties for apples]

pears: [distinct varieties for pears] ...

Here's my attempt:

data=readtable('fruitvegprices.csv');
m=1;%m,n,p are counters
n=1;
p=1;
items={'apples','pears','carrots','cabbage'};
matrix=cell(length(items),1);%creates 4-row matrix, where each row
%contains distinct varies of each corresponding item

[A, ia, ic]=unique(data.variety,'stable');

for i=1:length(data.item)
    if ismember(data.item{i},items)%checks if it's the item we want
        for j=1:length(ia)
            if strcmp(data.item{ia(j)},data.item{i})==0 %checks if variety correponds to the correct item
                continue 
            end
            matrix{find(strcmp(data.item{i},items)),p}=data.variety{ia(j)};
            p=p+1;   
        end
        lst(1).(data.item{i})=matrix{find(strcmp(data.item{i},items)),:};
    end
end

My approch was to first obtain a list 'A' of distinct varies for all items, then loop through 'ia' to identity any duplicated varieties for each of the 4 items. If succesful I would obtain a 4-row matrix whose rows are the distinct varieties for the 4 items, then I could assign the corresponding row and structure field.

However, this did not quite work out the way I planned, I think it's giving me a matrix of ALL varities, and the output for the structure is not as anticipated too:

Could someone enlighten me?

Thank you very much!

[Image Analyst]

You forgot to attach 'fruitvegprices.csv'. I don't expect answers until you attach it.

[Achuan Chen]

Sorry I did forget, I've just uploaded it!

[Stephen23]

Is there a particular reason you need to use a structure? The data are very neatly organized into columns, so using a table would most likely be much easier for you when processing that data.

[Achuan Chen]

No not at all, it was the first thing that came to mind and I couldn't figure out another method.

Answer 1

[KSSV]

You can use ismember. I don't think you need to use a loop here.

T=readtable('fruitvegprices.csv'); % first column of T is items and second is variety 
items={'apples','pears','carrots','cabbage'};
% Get apples
[idx,ia] = ismember(T.(1),items{1});
T_apples = T(idx,:) ;  % this gives table of apples alone 

Now you can convert it to structure using table2struct.

[Achuan Chen]

Thanks. Slight problem, this creates a table of all occurences of apple, but I was trying to find the distinct varieties of each item

,

as shown in the output most of the entries in 'variety' are duplicates.

How can I pick out only the distinct varieties?

Thank you so much!

[Achuan Chen]

Nevermind, I solved this by using the unique function. Thank you very much!

[KSSV]

Yes you need to use unique. Perfect.