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### 6.2 Cell Arrays

It can be both necessary and convenient to store several variables of different size or type in one variable. A cell array is a container class able to do just that. In general cell arrays work just like N-dimensional arrays, with the exception of the use of ‘`{`’ and ‘`}`’ as allocation and indexing operators.

As an example, the following code creates a cell array containing a string and a 2-by-2 random matrix

         c = {"a string", rand(2, 2)};

And a cell array can be indexed with the { and } operators, so the variable created in the previous example can be indexed like this

         c{1}
               ans = a string

As with numerical arrays several elements of a cell array can be extracted by indexing with a vector of indexes

         c{1:2}
               ans =

                   (,
                     [1] = a string
                     [2] =

                        0.593993   0.627732
                        0.377037   0.033643

                   ,)

The indexing operators can also be used to insert or overwrite elements of a cell array. The following code inserts the scalar 3 on the third place of the previously created cell array

         c{3} = 3
               c =

                  {
                    [1,1] = a string
                    [1,2] =

                       0.593993   0.627732
                       0.377037   0.033643

                    [1,3] =  3
                  }

In general nested cell arrays are displayed hierarchically as above. In some circumstances it makes sense to reference them by their index, and this can be performed by the `celldisp` function.

— Function File: celldisp (c, name)

> Recursively display the contents of a cell array. By default the values are displayed with the name of the variable c. However, this name can be replaced with the variable name.

> See also: disp.