how to easily and quickly change the variable names (headers) of multiple tables

Hi,

I have 20 tables, let's call them A,B,C.....etc. with size of 1000 lines and 40 column.

I would like to concatenate them all in dimension 1, using function

cat(1,A,B,C.....etc)

the problem is that I must assign each table the same Headers (variable names) to each column, to be able to concanenate them all. Right now, they are all different, because the Headers were assigned by MATLAB somewhere in my code.

Right now, the code I have is

A.Properties.VariableNames{1}='Header1'

and the code above works perfectly for assigning the variable name 'Header1' to the column 1 of Table A.

However, I am pretty confident that there is a way to automate this for every case (20 tables and 40 columns), without the need to write 800 lines of code (20*40), which obviously makes no sense. Any help is appreciated.

Thank you very much,

Best regards,

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

A.Properties.VariableNames can be assigned a cell array of character vectors to change all of the names. This would reduce down to 20 lines.

Alternatively, table2cell all the tables, vertcat the result, cell2table with 'VariableNames' option

[Jon]

In particular you can assign

B.Properties.VariableNames = A.Properties.VariableNames
C.Properties.VariableNames = A.Properties.VariableNames
% etc

Better if you had an array of tables you could do this in a loop.

Answer 2

[Scott MacKenzie]

For each table, it can be done like this: (To illustrate, this example is just for 5 columns)

T = array2table(rand(3,5));
vn = repmat("Header", 1,5) + string(1:5)

vn = 1×5 string array
    "Header1"    "Header2"    "Header3"    "Header4"    "Header5"

T.Properties.VariableNames = vn

T = 3×5 table
    Header1    Header2     Header3    Header4     Header5 
    _______    ________    _______    _______    _________

     0.7791     0.74276    0.25609    0.73802      0.29442
    0.36951    0.059274    0.61946    0.45536        0.911
    0.78598      0.3063    0.44896    0.16828    0.0066547