MATLAB switch

The switch is another type of conditional statement and executes one of the group of several statements.

If we want to test the equality against a pre-defined set of rules, then the switch statement can be an alternative of the if statement.

Syntax:

switch switch_expression
	case case_expression1
		Statements
	case case_expression2
		Statements
	case case_expressionN
		Statements	
	otherwise
		Statements
End

Flowchart of Switch statement

Following are the points while using switch in MATLAB:

Similar to if block, the switch block tests each case until one of the case_expression is true. It is evaluated as:

case & switch must be equal for numbers as- case_expression == switch_expression.
For character vectors, the result returned by the strcmp function must be equal to 1 as - strcmp(case_expression, switch_expression) == 1.
For object, case_expression == switch_expression.
For a cell array, at least one of the elements of the cell array in case_expression must match switch_expression.
switch statement doesn't test for inequality, so a case_expression cannot include relational operators such as < or > for comparison against the switch_expression.

Example1:

% program to check whether the entered number is a weekday or not
a = input('enter a number : ')
switch  a
    case 1
        disp('Monday')
    case 2
        disp('Tuesday')
    case 3
        disp('Wednesday')
    case 4
        disp('Thursday')
    case 5
        disp('Friday')
    case 6
        disp('Saturday')
    case 7
        disp('Sunday')
    otherwise
        disp('not a weekday')
end

Output:

enter a number: 4
Thursday

Example2:

% Program to find the weekday of a given date
% take date input from keyboard in the specified format
d = input('enter a date in the format- dd-mmm-yyyy:',"s")
% weekday function takes input argument
% and returns the day number & day name of the particular date.
[dayNumber, dayName] = weekday(d,'long',"local");
% use switch and case to display the output as per the entered input
switch dayNumber
    case 2
        x = sprintf('Start of the week-%s-:%d',dayName,dayNumber);
        disp(x)
    case 3
        x = sprintf('%s:%d',dayName,dayNumber);
        disp(x)
    case 4
        x = sprintf('%s:%d',dayName,dayNumber);
        disp(x)
    case 5
        x = sprintf('%s:%d',dayName,dayNumber);
        disp(x)
    case 6 
        x = sprintf('Last working day-%s-of the week:%d',dayName,dayNumber);
        disp(x)
    otherwise
        disp('weekend')
end

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