Saving a new table for every loop iteration

I am having trouble saving a function output in a for loop with a different variable name

variable_max = size(variable_scan,1);

for i = 1:variable_max
    data_name = variable_scan{i,1};
    column_name = variable_scan{i,2};
    name = strcat('data_table',num2str(i));
    name = dataextract(data,data_name,column_name);
end

dataextract outputs a table. I would like to save this output with something like table_'column_name'

[Stephen23]

"I am having trouble saving a function output in a for loop with a different variable name"

Yes, that is indeed a difficult thing to do. And also completely pointless because MATLAB has much neater, simpler, easier and more efficient methods of handling data.

Magically trying to create or access variable names is slow, complex, buggy, obfuscated, hard to debug, and insecure. In contrast using indexing is neat, simple, fast, easy to debug, and very efficient.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/304528-tutorial-why-variables-should-not-be-named-dynamically-eval

Answer 1

[KL]

Don't do that. Dynamic variable creation is a bad idea and totally unnecessary.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/304528-tutorial-why-variables-should-not-be-named-dynamically-eval

Use a cell array.

 data = cell(variable_max,1);
 column_name  = cell(variable_max,1);
 %and preallocate other variables, this is important if you want your code to be faster
 for k=1:variable_max
   ...
   ...
   column_name {k,1} = ...
   data{k,1} = dataextract(...)
 end

Now you have all your tables under one variable. You can access them by indexing.