I’ve often seen the following conversion approaches:
matlab array -> python numpy array
matlab cell array -> python list
matlab structure -> python dict
So in your case that would correspond to a python list containing dicts, which themselves contain numpy arrays as entries
item[i]['attribute1'][2,j]
Note
Don’t forget the 0-indexing in python!
[Update]
Additional: Use of classes
Further to the simple conversion given above, you could also define a dummy class, e.g.
class structtype():
pass
This allows the following type of usage:
>> s1 = structtype()
>> print s1.a
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-40-7734865fddd4> in <module>()
----> 1 print s1.a
AttributeError: structtype instance has no attribute 'a'
>> s1.a=10
>> print s1.a
10
Your example in this case becomes, e.g.
>> item = [ structtype() for i in range(10)]
>> item[9].a = numpy.array([1,2,3])
>> item[9].a[1]
2