Merge structures with overlapping fieldname

Hello,

I'm trying to intelligently combine to data sets to create a new complete data set. The setup is as follows:

data.set1.ID = [457;568;422;8997;544;366];
data.set1.type = {'fish';'cat';'dog';'horse';'monkey';'yellow'};
data.set2.ID = [568;233;422;8997;366;78887;544;111];
data.set2.num = [68;55;44;22;89446;23447;5975;13544];

I would like the output to be a new structure with 3 fields, ID, type, and num that has been aligned by ID. If there isn't a num or type for a particular ID, it will just have a "NaN" placeholder.

I've tried finding and looping but it was slow and used up all of my RAM (my data set is large). It looks like there is a data type called a table in R2013b but I only have 2013a. I thought there had to be a better way. Thanks for any help you can provide!

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

d.ID=[data.set1.ID;data.set2.ID]
d.type=[data.set1.type;num2cell(repmat(nan,numel(data.set2.ID),1))]
d.num=[repmat(nan,numel(data.set1.ID),1);data.set2.num]

Answer 2

[Sean de Wolski]

You could do this in R2013a's Statistics Toolbox with the dataset class. If your organization is current on SMS, you can upgrade to the newest release.