How to make a dictionary of arrays?

I can't seem to figure out how containers.Map works... It's doing ok with characters and numbers, but flips out when I try to feed it arrays. How do I make something like this?

    function test
    global a

    a = containers.Map();
    a(pi) = 3:14;
    a(5) = 4:2:10;

    end

[Solarmew]

oh, i think i know why ... it probably thinks i'm trying to access "pi"'th element in that array where what I'm actually trying to do is create a key a(pi) that will return 3:14 array ... Does anyone know how to fix this?

Answer 1

[Geoff Hayes]

Solarmew - the default KeySet type for a container is char (see containers.Map for details) and so when you try the above, you probably see the following error message

 Error using containers.Map/subsasgn
 Specified key type does not match the type expected for this container.

The above error makes sense since your key of pi or 5 are of type double (or single). Since you want your keys to be doubles then just define the KeySet and _ValueType* properties as

 a = containers.Map('KeyType','double','ValueType','any');

which means that

 a = 
  Map with properties:
        Count: 0
      KeyType: double
    ValueType: any

And so you can now use pi or 5 as a key

 a(pi) = 3:14;
 a(5)  = 4:2:10;

Try the above and see what happens!