Indexing a Structure in matlab - matlab

Question

I was under the impression that structure in matlab were similar to query tables in sql but I have a feeling I might be wrong.
I have a rather large dataset consisting of many entries and many fields. Ideally I want to index the structure, pulling out only the data I am interested in. Here is an example of the dataset
Cond Type Stime ETime
2 10 1 900
2 10 1 900
2 10 1 900
3 1 901 1800
3 1 901 1800
4 1 1801 2700
8 1 901 1800
8 1 901 1800
9 1 901 1800
9 1 901 1800
12 1 901 1800
12 1 901 1800
13 10 1 900
13 10 1 900
13 10 1 900
16 1 901 1800
16 1 901 1800
17 10 1 900
17 10 1 900
17 10 1 900
19 10 1 900
19 10 1 900
19 10 1 900
20 10 1 900
20 10 1 900
20 10 1 900
22 1 901 1800
22 1 901 1800
25 10 1 900
25 10 1 900
25 10 1 900
27 1 901 1800
27 1 901 1800
28 1 901 1800
28 1 901 1800
30 1 1801 2700
31 1 901 1800
31 1 901 1800
32 10 1 900
32 10 1 900
32 10 1 900
35 10 1 900
35 10 1 900
35 10 1 900
What I want to do is pull specific data entries for analysis example being I want all entries where Type is equal to 10 or I want all Cond from 1:20 that have ETime == 900.
I can do this by the following
idx = find([stats.Type] == 10);
[stats(idx).Stime]
but for multiple types I need a for loop as trying to use a vector throws an error.
idx = find([stats.Type] == 1:10); % Does not work
% must use this
temp = [];
for aa = 1:10
idx = find([stats.Type] == aa);
temp = horzcat(idx,temp);
end
[stats(temp).Stime]
Is this the wrong way to use structures? Is there an easier method to index a structure to pull data of interest?

Answer 1

This answer proposes using table indexing instead of struct indexing, which is a bit of a side-step to directly answering the question. However, my comments on this post were deemed useful so I've formalised as an answer...
If you use struct2table then you can interact with it as a table, which is generally much more intuitive.
Structures are useful if your fields have different numbers of elements (i.e. you couldn't form a consistent height table). In almost all other areas, I find tables are easier to use.
With tables you can use:
Logical indexing
Sorting (including sortrows by column name)
The family of "join" operations
Dot notation for accessing table columns by name, as you do for accessing struct fields, or select multiple columns by name using myTable( :, {'col1','col2'} ). - You don't need weird syntactic tricks like [stats.Type] to group outputs, you can just do stats.Type
I would then use ismember to compare multiple items against a table column...
idx = ismember( stats.Type, 1:10 );
Unless you need the indices, you can skip using find for speed, and just directly index using idx.