how to convert a timetable to structure of timetables

hi, I'm looking for some pointers/advice on how best to move data from a timetable to a structure contataining individual variable timetables.

TT = Time, var1 , var2, var3, etc

to

struct containing Time,var1 ; Time var2; Time var3; etc...

thanks in advance

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

table2struct(timetable2table(yourtimetable))
%or possibly
table2struct(timetable2table(yourtimetable), 'ToScalar', true)

However, tables and timetables are a lot easier to work with than structures, so it's a bit odd to want to do that. Can you explain the reason behind it?

[john kozicz]

Guillaume, thanks so much for your quick reply. i've attached the results generated using your two suggested methods along with the input data and a "manually created" example of the desired output struct.

yes, working with tables and timetables is much more straight forward. in this case i'm preprocessing data for some previously developed code that expects the input data to be a structure of timetables representing each of the variables from a larger/consolidated timetable; ie kind of like "de-synchronizing" a time table.

best regards

[Guillaume]

Oh, I see what you want as a structure. Personally, I would work on changing the processing function so that it takes the timetable as inpuit (and possibly a list of variables to process). This splitting of the timetable is completely pointless, you're just unnecessarily duplicating the time column.

Anyway:

fields = yourtimetable.Properties.VariableNames;
fieldsvalues = [fields; cellfun(@(fn) yourtimetable(:, fn), fields, 'UniformOutput', false)];
desiredstruct = struct(fieldsvalues{:});

The same using a loop:

desiredstruct = struct;
for fn = yourtimetable.Properties.VariableNames
    desiredstruct.(fn{1}) = yourtimetable(:, fn{1});
end

[john kozicz]

Guillaume, once again; thanks for your timely help with this. it is much appreciated.

i'm not that familiar with anonymous functions/notation so i'm wondering is the fn in @(fn) refering to the variable 'fields' in the call to cellfun(@(fn)...,fields,....) ?

i don't have access to the legacy code (yet!) so can't make the necessary changes to the old code to accept timetables as input; on the brighter side i've learned someting that i would not have had to otherwise ie how to use cellfun.

best regards

[Guillaume]

fn is indeed the input variable of the anonymous function that will receive in turn each element of the cell array fields. All cellfun is doing is iterating over each variable of the timetable to return only that portion of the timetable. This is all concatenated as the 2nd row of a cell array, with the first row the actual variable names.

Expansion of cell arrays into a comma separated list allows us to pass that as inputs to the struct function.