stored character string to character matrix by using loop

I am going to use loop to prompt out 4 course name as 5-character string as form'AB101'. And I need to stored those string in a character matrix course.

n=4;
for i = 1:n
    class{i} = input('Enter the course name : ','s')
    mymat = [ 'myDataFile' str2num(class{:}) '.mat' ];
    save(mymat);
end
str2num('class')

Here, I saved those 4 course by 4 mat file, however, how can I store in one file and switch them to a character matrix?

Answer 1

[Geoff Hayes]

Jarvan - you should avoid using class as a variable name since it conflicts with a MATLAB built-in function of the same name. Consider renaming it to * courseNames*. If you want to save all data to a single file, then try the following

 n=4;
 courseNames = cell(n,1);   % pre-size classNames as a row vector
 for k=1:n
     courseNames{k} = input('Enter the course name : ','s');
 end

 % convert courseNames to a character matrix
 courseNames = char(courseNames);

 % write this variable to file
 save('myCourseNames.mat','courseNames');

So we save all 4 course names to the same mat file.

With your code, the str2num(class{:}) probably generated an error (or at least it did for me on the second iteration of your loop). Converting a string that has characters to a number, for example str2num('AB101') would produce an empty matrix. And then, on the second iteration of the loop converting both column elements from class{:} would throw the

 Error using str2num
 Too many input arguments.

What were you attempting with this line of code?

[jarvan]

I am trying to switch the stored character string to matrix

[jarvan]

btw your code works for me ,thanks:)