Indexing a cell in MATLAB with a vector

Question

Assume that I am given the cell M , and a vector v , and assume that v holds a correct address for an element in M . Without any apriori knowledge of the structure of M and v , I wish to fetch the element from M that v points to. How can I do this? For instance, M{v} does not quite do what I need:

say M = cell(3,4,5) , v = [1,2,3] , then doing M{v} produces [M{1}, M{2}, M{3}] .

So my question is: how can I encapsulate an address of a cell element into a variable v and later fetch the element at that address from the given cell?

The same question for any array instead of cell.

Answer 1

v has to be a cell not a vector, then you can use sub2ind :

v=mat2cell(v(:),ones(numel(v),1))
M(sub2ind(size(M),v{:}))