Matlab - Using special characters in table header - matlab

Question

I have constructed a table with data from a struct and now wish to add custom headers to the columns before exporting the table. I found the following command:
T.Properties.VariableNames{'OldHeader'} = 'NewHeader';
This command however does not allow me to use spaces or special characters for my headers. My table contains the output from processed lab data and I wish to have headers like "Vol. [mL]" and "Conc. [wt%]".
To illustrate using the example from matlab documentation:
S.Name = {'CLARK';'BROWN';'MARTIN'};
S.Gender = {'M';'F';'M'};
S.SystolicBP = [124;122;130];
S.DiastolicBP = [93;80;92];
T = struct2table(S)
T.Properties.VariableNames{'Gender'} = 'Sex';
The above works, but restricts me to normal characters and no spaces. My question is how to change "Gender" to "Vol. [mL]" - if even possible?

Answer 1

As #Jubobs already mentioned in the comment, there are some rules for naming variables that prevent you from choosing the exact name that you want. From the documentation that I found by googling the topic:
A valid variable name starts with a letter, followed by letters,
digits, or underscores. MATLAB® is case sensitive, so A and a are not
the same variable. The maximum length of a variable name is the value
that the namelengthmax command returns.
You cannot define variables with the same names as MATLAB keywords,
such as if or end. For a complete list, run the iskeyword command.
However, I could think of two easy ways to work around this:
Different names, for example you can use the variable name Vol_ml
Store the names in a list, perhaps with an index code like v1 for the first variable name, then you can make v1 the name of the first variable.