Name each variable differently in a loop - matlab

Question

I have created a .dat file of file names. I want to read into MATLAB each file in that list and give the data a different name. Currently, each iteration just overwrites the last one.
I found that a lot of people give this answer:
for i=1:10
A{i} = 1:i;
end
However, it isn't working for my problem. Here's what I am doing
flist = fopen('fnames.dat'); % Open the list of file names
nt = 0; % Counter will go up one for each file loaded
while ~feof(flist) % While end of file has not been reached
for i = 1:6 % Number of filenames in the .dat file
% For each file
fname = fgetl(flist); % Reads next line of list, which is the name of the next data file
disp(fname); % Stores name as string in fname
nt = nt+1; % Time index
% Save data
data{i} = read_mixed_csv(fname, '\t'); % Reads in the CSV file% Open file
data{i} = data(2:end,:); % Replace header row
end
end
The code runs with no errors, but only one data variable is saved.
My fnames.dat contains this:
IA_2007_MDA8_O3.csv
IN_2007_MDA8_O3.csv
MI_2007_MDA8_O3.csv
MN_2007_MDA8_O3.csv
OH_2007_MDA8_O3.csv
WI_2007_MDA8_O3.csv
If possible, I would really like to name data something more intuitive. Like IA for the first file, IN for the second and so on. Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

The last line of the loop is the problem:
data{i} = data(2:end,:);
I don't know what exactly happens I did not run your code, but data(2:end,:) refers to the second to last dataset, not the second to last line.
Try:
thisdata = read_mixed_csv(fname, '\t');
data{i} = thisdata(2:end,:);

Answer 2

If you want to keep track of what data came from which file, save out a second cell array with the names:
thisdata = read_mixed_csv(fname, '\t');
data{i} = thisdata(2:end,:);
names{i} = fname(1:2); % presuming you only need first two letters.
If you need a specific part of the filename that's not always the same length look into strtok or fileparts. Then you can use things like strcmp to check the cell array names for where the data labelled IA or whichever is stored.

Answer 3

As mentioned by #Daniel the simple way to store data of various sizes in a cell array.
data{1} = thisdata(2:end,:)
However, if the names are really important, you could consider using a struct instead. For example:
dataStruct(1).numbers= thisdata(2:end,:);
dataStruct(1).name= theRelevantName
Of course you could also just add them to the cell array:
dataCell{1,1} = thisdata(2:end,:);
dataCell{1,2} = theRelevantName