Check if any field in a given structure is empty

Hello everyone,

I have a structure with quite some fields and I want to check, if any of the fields are empty. Is there a way to do this without checking for each field individually?

Currently I have an if statement with many ORs to do this:

if isempty(structure.field1) || isempty(structure.field2)

and so on

I tried to do the same with

any(isempty(fieldnames(structure))

but obviously the fieldnames are not empty.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

any( structfun(@isempty, YourStructure) )

[ihrram]

Thank you for your quick answer.

[LULU XUE]

cool. thanks

[micholeodon]

Ok, but how about non-scalar structures? This trick will do only for scalar ones.

[Gabor]

It dis not for me on a table:

a.table{1}=table();
a.table{2}=table();

>> any( structfun(@isempty, a.table{20}) )
Index exceeds matrix dimensions.
 
>> any( structfun(@isempty, a.table{2}) )
Error using structfun
Inputs to STRUCTFUN must be scalar structures.

How can I check if a.table{20} exists or not or empty? Anything that whould give me information of it exsistance? I could not find any function that could have helped so far.

Thank you

[Walter Roberson]

if length(a.table) >= 20 & ~isempty(a.table{20})

Answer 2

[Ross Nye]

I'm going to leave this here in case someone comes across this page looking for a similar answer to what I was.

I have a 1xN struct with many fields. One particular field was supposed to be boolean, but only the falses had been entered and the rest were []. The above answers didn't seem to help me, but I did find something on Reddit which did.

emptyIndex = find(arrayfun(@(MyStruct) isempty(MyStruct.myField),MyStruct));

I can then use emptyIndex to set the fields to true as needed.

HTH someone.

[Jesse Yates]

This helped me, thank you!

[Selene Fregosi]

This helped me too - thank you!

[Andres]

This will work as well

find(cellfun(@isempty,{MyStruct.myField}))

for a struct array MyStruct with field myField.

Note in many cases you don't need find for indexing.

Example: fill empty fields with 0s

MyStruct(3).myField = 123;
hasNone = cellfun(@isempty,{MyStruct.myField});
[MyStruct(hasNone).myField] = deal(0);

Answer 3

[LeChat]

It might be a bit dirty because I use a loop but it works:

ind=[];
for ii=1:numel(MyStruct)
    if isempty(MyStruct(ii).FieldName)
        ind=[ind, ii];
    end
end

Then ind contains all the indexes where the structure field is empty.

For instance if you then want to remove them from the structure:

MyStruct_init=MyStruct;
MyStruct(ind)=[];

Hope this helps!

[Dominique]

Quick and dirty works :)