Equivalent of deal for a table

I often use deal to change the values of several cells in a cell array of strings:

a = 1:5;
b = {'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five'};

[b{a>3}] = deal('big');

However, I just discovered that attempting the same operation on a table variable throws an error:

a = 1:5;
b = {'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five'};
t = table(a,b);
[t.b{t.a>3}] = deal('big');

yields:

Expected one output from a curly brace or dot indexing expression, but there were 2
results.

Is there an equivalent syntax to quickly reassign values in a table?

[Cedric]

I fear that this will bring us directly back to the somehow long list of things that only built-ins can support, for a reason of parsing or of overloading of SUBSASGN/REF/etc, or ..(?) And table objects are not built-ins ( -> open table ).

If we

 open deal

and place a break point on the first line of code, the "cell array"-based example leads to nargout=2 and the table-based example leads to nargout=1..

[Kelly Kearney]

Yes, looking further into it, it seems this is documented (though somewhat difficult to find) in the help for the @table/subsasgn method:

%   LIMITATIONS:
%  
%      You cannot assign multiple values into a table variable or property using
%      assignments such as
%         [A.CellVar{1:2}] = deal(B1,B2),
%         [A.StructVar(1:2).field] = deal(B1,B2), or
%         [A.Properties.ObsNames{1:2}] = deal(B1,B2)
%      Use multiple assignments of the form A.CellVar{1} = B1 instead.

Oh well.

[Cedric]

Hmm, not as bad as a rainbow color map ;-) but still.. well, hopefully this will become a built-in in a near future! (not 2015b though, because I have the same issue on the pre-release)

Answer 1

[Bernard]

It would be nice to have this functionality. In the meantime, this works, although not as elegant.

t.b(t.a>3) = repmat({'big'}, size(t.b(t.a>3)))