Any function to get a short description of a variable just like the Value column in workspace?.

I have a struct with >4000 members/fields. I am writing a search function to find some matching members and displaying them along with a short description. Ideally i want the description to be like the value column of workspace(see below).

[Von Duesenberg]

If your structure is called s for example, you can access the size of fields like this (so I suppose you can access other properties as well):

structfun(@size, s, 'Uni', 0)

[Praveen Iyyappan Valsala]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't need just the size:(. I need value if it is a short array/single element or its size if it is a long one. Also the input can be another struct, class object or other datatype.

Answer 1

[Jan]

What about writing a function, which satisfies your needs exactly?

function C = DispStructRoughly(S)
Field = fieldnames(S);
Data  = struct2cell(S);
C     = cell(1, numel(Field));
for iC = 1:numel(Field)
  D      = Data{iC};
  classD = class(D);
  if ndims(D) > 3
    if isnumeric(D) && ~isreal(D)
      comp = 'complex ';
    else
      comp = '';
    end
    if isempty(D)
      empty = 'Empty ';
    else
      empty = '';
    end
    C{iC} = sprintf('%s%d dim %s%s array', empty, ndims(D), comp, classD);
  elseif isnumeric(D)
    ...
  elseif ischar(D)
    C{iC} = D;
  elseif ...
  end
end

It is not hard to create the wanted strings exactly as you need them with all exceptions as you like. Simply try to expand this code and ask a specific question in case of problems.

[Ameer Hamza]

Just wondering, if there is a way to directly access these strings. MATLAB must have stored them in variable metadata, for display purposes.

[Praveen Iyyappan Valsala]

No wonder you are MVP;). I also thought of writing a function but then there are too many conditions and I got lazy:P . I tried some convoluted ways like this using details() / disp() and followed some string operation:

raw_text =evalc('details(MyStruct.parameter);');

This works for most except numeric arrays. where it prints all the elements.