Setting a string as a variable name

Hi there,

This is probably a very silly question but I'm using the follow snippet of code to extract some info from a data file. There are 5 values I would like to extract (i.e. numel(specVar) = 5), and the first one is a word while the last 4 are numbers. In my " if i == 1 " loop, I would like to assign the value from temp to specVal(1), rather than convert the string to a double , as I'm doing with specVal(2-5). I'm pretty sure this is just one simple command but "string(temp{2})" does not do it (obviously). What would be the right way to do this?

for i = 1:numel(specVar)
        % FIND VALUE OF VARIABLES
        expr                = specVar(i);
        [matchstart,~,~,~,~,~,splitstring] = regexpi(string,expr);
        % ASSIGN THE VALUE TO THE VARIABLES
        if ~isempty(cell2mat(matchstart))
            temp            = splitstring{1};
            if i == 1 
                specVal(i)      = string(temp{2});
            end
            specVal(i)      = str2double(temp{2});
        end
    end

[Stephen23]

Read this:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/304528-tutorial-why-variables-should-not-be-named-dynamically-eval