(Originally posted on Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials blog.)

This short video shows how you can make your code shorter, more flexible, and readable by using a string variable to reference a field in a structure. This is called dynamic field name reference or "dot parens" notation. You can say: fName = 'doug' a.(fName) %this now refers to a.doug

In this particular example, a MATLAB user was writing out dozens of different cases, when one loop with dynamic field name reference makes the code so much easier.