csvwrite error: Undefined function 'real'

I wrote a code to ask the user for information on the periodic table and put it into a struct. That all worked just fine. But I now need to write it to a cvs file and thats where it is not working. Im getting the error: "Underfind function 'real' for input arguments of type 'struct'".

The code where the error(s) are occuring

Im not too familiar with cvs. So am I not doing it right or am I hitting an error because of the way I wrote the code and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

[Rajanya]

Hi @Donovan Magney,

The error is because, in the code provided, the type of 'elementsMatrix' would be composite, mostly 'struct' (because 'elements' has nested fields in it suggesting it to be a structure (or an object)), which is not supported by 'csvwrite' as it expects it's argument types to be numeric, char or logical.

You can flatten 'elements' such that each leaf fieldname can be represented as a column in csv.

For example, subfields 'f' and 'g' of 'field1' of a structure 'S' can be represented as 'S_field1_f ' and 'S_field1_g' as follows:

A table can then be created with the flattened fieldnames as columns and the same can be written to a csv file.

As per the latest MathWorks documentation, 'csvwrite' is not recommended and instead, 'writematrix' or 'writetable' is to be used.

Thanks!