Jiro's pick this week is ANY2CSV by Felix Zoergiebel.

I use structures quite often. It allows me to store heterogeneous information in one variable, and I can have structures within structures as well. Sometimes, I go crazy and make many levels of hierarchy to organize my information.

Let's take a look at this data.

load data
whos

  Name      Size            Bytes  Class     Attributes

  a         4x1              2704  struct              

This is a structure that contains information from a series of stress tests. I can dig into the structure to see its contents...

a(1)

ans = 
     TestName: 'Stress Test One'
    Condition: 'fast'
         Test: [2x1 struct]

a(1).Test(1)

ans = 
     Date: 'May 3'
    Score: 89

But sometimes, I just want to view everything at once. ANY2CSV allows you to do just that. It flattens the structure and either displays it on the screen or saves it as a CSV file.

any2csv(a, ',', 0, 'a.csv');

Now, I have a summary of the data stored in the structure.

Very nice! I also want to thank Felix for his quick response to my enhancement request. I asked him whether the fields of the structure could be displayed vertically, rather than horizontally, and he updated the submission in a timely manner.

Comments?

Data visualizations don't always come in the form of graphs. We'd love to hear about other interesting ways of viewing information. Tell us about it here.

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Published with MATLAB® 7.7