how can I output an option from menu after the user has selected an option

I have a menu that prompts the user to select one of 4 materials to make a bat.

BatMa = menu('choose the bat material','ash','hickory','maple','pine');

After some caluclations for cost, i need to output the following

1. Producing ## MMM bats a week for ## weeks - ## total bats Where MMM is the material that the user selected.

I know that the menu does not return string, it return the value based on the option. so if option 1 was selected. BatMa = 1. if the user picked maple. BatMat = 3 and so on.

My problem is how can i store that as string if there is away.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

materials = {'ash', 'hicory', 'maple', 'pine'});
BatMa = menu('choose the bat material', materials);
if BatMa == 0; error('cancel'); end
chosen_material = materials{BatMa};

per_week = randi(500);
num_weeks = randi([5 20]);

fprintf('Producing %d %s bats a week for %d weeks - %d total bats\n', per_week, chosen_material, num_weeks, per_week*num_weeks);