MATLAB: Convert cell array of 1D strings to 2D string

Question

Recent versions of MATLAB have strings, which are N-Dimensional matrices of character vectors. I have a cell array of such 1D strings that I would like to combine into a single 2D string, but I am having a lot of trouble doing so. The join, strjoin and strcat functions work on the characters arrays inside the string, and cell2mat doesn't work:

>> cell2mat({strings(1, 4); strings(1, 4)})
Error using cell2mat (line 52)
CELL2MAT does not support cell arrays containing cell arrays or objects.

Is there any good way to do this? I expect the output in the above case to be a 2x1 string object.

Suever · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-22 21:06:17Z

1

string objects behave just like any other datatype (double, char, etc.) when it comes to concatenation with the same type. As long as you want the result to also be a string object, use normal concatenation.

result = [strings(1, 4); strings(1, 4)];

Or you can use cat or vertcat to be more explicit

result = cat(1, strings(1, 4), strings(1, 4));
result = vertcat(strings(1, 4), strings(1, 4));

Alternately you could use indexing to sample the same element twice

result = strings([1 1], 4);

If your data is already in a cell array, then you can use {:} indexing to generate a comma-separated list that you can pass to cat

C = {string('one'), string('two')};
result = cat(1, C{:})

As a side-note, there is no such thing as a 1-dimensional array in MATLAB. All arrays are at least two dimensions (one of which can be 1).

edited Mar 22, 2017 at 21:06

answered Mar 22, 2017 at 20:55

Suever

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1 Comment

TheBlackCat Over a year ago

That is just an example, I have the data in cell format, I don't have the individual strings.

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