I of course realized immediately that using cell arrays is much more flexible programming. Thanks for your comment!

Martin

Creating variables named s1, s2, s3, etc. is generally a bad idea for several reasons, some of which Loren called out in her blog post and others of which are discussed in the Programming section of the comp.soft-sys.matlab FAQ:

http://matlab.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ

I would use a cell array for this task.

s = cell(1, 10);
for k = 1:10
    s{k} = sprintf('file%d', k);
% or
%   s{k} = ['file' num2str(k)];
end

To extract one of the strings (for example, ‘file5′) from the cell array use curly brace indexing:

myfilename = s{5}

or you could iterate over the cells in the cell array using a FOR loop or the CELLFUN function.

for k = 1:numel(s)
    fprintf('String number %d is %s.\n', k, s{k});
end

I have used EVAL to perform the following loop statement to create n variables named s1, s2, …, etc. containing a string

for i = 1:10
eval(['s' num2str(i) '=' 'file'])
end

but what I really want to do is name the strings ‘file1′,
‘file2′, …, etc. which does not seem to work with EVAL

for i = 1:10
eval(['s' num2str(i) '=' 'file' num2str(i)])
end

Do you have any suggestions for avoiding EVAL ?

Best,
Martin

I was a bit desperate because I thought I was forced to use the eval function in my code. And of course the calculation time just skyrocketed…

But now, I know how not to use that lazy function.

Thanks again !