I'm stuck with a supposedly simple problem in MATLAB. I have a 1x43 cell array that looks like this (note the space before each value):
labels = {' 1', ' 2', ' 3', ... , ' 43'};
And I simply want to convert it to a numeric vector of dimensions 1x43 that will look like this:
labels_numeric = [1 2 3 ... 43];
Anyone could hint me the right trick for this?
You can collect the individual character arrays into a single character array, then use str2num to convert it:
labels_numeric = str2num([labels{:}]);
Or even easier, just use str2double:
labels_numeric = str2double(labels);
gnovice's answer is the simplest solution to this specific problem, but in general if you want to turn a cell array into a numeric one by applying some transformation to each element you can do so using cellfun. For example if you ask MATLAB for length({'apple' 'orange' 'banana'}) you'll get 3, but if you want the length of each string in the array you can do:
>> cellfun(@length, {'apple' 'orange' 'banana'})
ans =
5 6 6
You can use an anonymous function, or a handle to a function that you have defined, as the argument to cellfun, so the transformation can be as complex as you need.
As long as the result from your function is a scalar numeric or logical value, the output from cellfun will be a numeric or logical array; otherwise it will be another cell array (and if it varies in size you will need to use the 'UniformOutput', false argument pair)
