I had a query from a MATLAB user the other day and I thought I would share it with the world just in case it turned out to be useful to someone.\u00a0 She had some data in a cell array that appeared as follows<\/p>\n
data =\r\n\r\n '-0.000252594'\r\n '-0.788638'\r\n '-1.14636'\r\n '-1.15374'\r\n '-1.15474'<\/pre>\nI’m not sure how she ended up with her data in this form but that’s not important here. What is important is that she couldn’t calculate with it in all the ways she was used to so what she asked was ‘how do I convert this cell array to a matrix?<\/strong>‘<\/p>\n
It turns out that this is relatively easy to do since this particular cell array has a very simple form.\u00a0 If you want to follow along then you can create an identical cell array as follows<\/p>\n
\r\ndata={'-0.000252594'; '-0.788638'; '-1.14636' ;'-1.15374' ;'-1.15474'}\r\n\r\ndata =\r\n\r\n '-0.000252594'\r\n '-0.788638'\r\n '-1.14636'\r\n '-1.15374'\r\n '-1.15474'\r\n<\/pre>\nLet’s check that this really is a cell array using the iscell()<\/strong> function<\/p>\n
\r\niscell(data)\r\n\r\nans =\r\n 1\r\n<\/pre>\nLooks good so far. So, to convert this to a matrix all you need to do is<\/p>\n
\r\nmatdata=cellfun(@str2num,data)\r\n\r\nmatdata =\r\n -0.0003\r\n -0.7886\r\n -1.1464\r\n -1.1537\r\n -1.1547\r\n<\/pre>\nthe variable matdata<\/strong> is a standard MATLAB matrix and to prove it I’ll add 1 to all of the elements in the usual fashion<\/p>\n
\r\nmatdata+1\r\n\r\nans =\r\n 0.9997\r\n 0.2114\r\n -0.1464\r\n -0.1537\r\n -0.1547\r\n<\/pre>\nThat’s it! If only all queries were that simple :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had a query from a MATLAB user the other day and I thought I would share it with the world just in case it turned out to be useful to someone.\u00a0 She had some data in a cell array that appeared as follows data = ‘-0.000252594’ ‘-0.788638’ ‘-1.14636’ ‘-1.15374’ ‘-1.15474′ I’m not sure how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-matlab"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-oe","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1502"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1506,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502\/revisions\/1506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}