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It can be both necessary and convenient to store several variables of different size or type in one variable. A cell array is a container class able to do just that. In general cell arrays work just like N-dimensional arrays, with the exception of the use of ‘{’ and ‘}’ as allocation and indexing operators.
As an example, the following code creates a cell array containing a string and a 2-by-2 random matrix
c = {"a string", rand(2, 2)};
And a cell array can be indexed with the { and } operators, so the variable created in the previous example can be indexed like this
c{1} ans = a string
As with numerical arrays several elements of a cell array can be extracted by indexing with a vector of indexes
c{1:2} ans = (, [1] = a string [2] = 0.593993 0.627732 0.377037 0.033643 ,)
The indexing operators can also be used to insert or overwrite elements of a cell array. The following code inserts the scalar 3 on the third place of the previously created cell array
c{3} = 3 c = { [1,1] = a string [1,2] = 0.593993 0.627732 0.377037 0.033643 [1,3] = 3 }
In general nested cell arrays are displayed hierarchically as above. In
some circumstances it makes sense to reference them by their index, and
this can be performed by the celldisp
function.