Programming and Data Types

Converting to a Cell Array of Strings

The cellstr function converts a character array into a cell array of strings. Consider the character array

data = ['Allison Jones';'Development  ';'Phoenix      '];

Each row of the matrix is padded so that all have equal length (in this case, 13 characters).

Now use cellstr to create a column vector of cells, each cell containing one of the strings from the data array.

celldata = cellstr(data)

celldata = 

    'Allison Jones'
    'Development'
    'Phoenix'

Note that the cellstr function strips off the blanks that pad the rows of the input string matrix.

length(celldata{3})

ans =

    7

The iscellstr function determines if the input argument is a cell array of strings. It returns a logical true (1) in the case of celldata.

iscellstr(celldata)

ans =

     1

Use char to convert back to a standard padded character array.

strings = char(celldata)

strings =

Allison Jones
Development
Phoenix

String/Numeric Conversion

The str2double function converts a cell array of strings to the double-precision values represented by the strings.

c = {'37.294e-1'; '-58.375'; '13.796'};
str2double(c)

ans =

    3.7294
  -58.3750
   13.7960

Cell Arrays of Strings

String Comparisons