What is an elegant way to pack and unpack an array of structures to/from a single vector?

What I've got is an array of structures of somewhat complicated data:

data(1).r = [ 1 2 3 ];
data(1).v = [ 4 5 6 ];
data(1).m = 100;
data(2).r = [ 7 8 9 ];
data(2).v = [ 10 11 12 ];
data(2).m = 101;

I'd like to convert this to an array where each structure was packed together. My solution looks like this:

N = length(data);

x = [];
for i=1:N
  x = [ x data(i).r data(i).v data(i).m ];
end

Which results in the correct order that I'd like the structures to be packed into the vector:

x =

     1     2     3     4     5     6   100     7     8     9    10    11    12   101

Is there a more elegant way to do that packing, and what is the most elegant way to do the reverse operation and unpack that array back into an array of structures?

Answer 1

[madhan ravi]

z = struct2cell(data);
x = [z{:}]
data = cell2struct(z,{'r','v','m'}) % reverse

[Lamont Granquist]

That is a lot better. But I want data as a function of an arbitrarily modified x vector, so its missing a step which would be the inverse of x = [z{:}]