Horizontally concatenate cell array of strings

Question

I wish to horizontally concatenate lines of a cell array of strings as shown below.

start = {'hello','world','test';'join','me','please'}

finish = {'helloworldtest';'joinmeplease'}

Are there any built-in functions that accomplish the above transformation?

gnovice · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-02 05:00:23Z

22

There is an easy non-loop way you can do this using the functions NUM2CELL and STRCAT:

>> finish = num2cell(start,1);
>> finish = strcat(finish{:})

finish = 

    'helloworldtest'
    'joinmeplease'

edited Feb 2, 2011 at 5:00

answered Feb 2, 2011 at 4:34

gnovice

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Jonas · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-01 23:01:01Z

1

A simple way is too loop over the rows

nRows = size(start,1);
finish = cell(nRows,1);

for r = 1:nRows
    finish{r} = [start{r,:}];
end

EDIT

A more involved and slightly harder to read solution that does the same (the general solution is left as an exercise for the reader)

finish = accumarray([1 1 1 2 2 2]',[ 1 3 5 2 4 6]',[],@(x){[start{x}]})

edited Feb 1, 2011 at 23:01

answered Feb 1, 2011 at 22:52

Jonas

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3 Comments

Chris R Over a year ago

Thanks, it works, I spent the last 20 minutes trying to do it with vectorization - I can't remember the last time I actually have used a loop in Matlab :)

Jonas Over a year ago

@Chris R: As you can see, there is a non-loop solution using accumarray, though you might not want to use that. Anyway, if the loop doesn't make too many function calls, it is usually reasonably fast in newer versions of Matlab.

Amro Over a year ago

@ChrisR: if you dont like the for-loop, you can write in one line as: finish = arrayfun(@(i)[start{i,:}], 1:size(start,1), 'UniformOutput',false)';

Rizwan Asif · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-29 08:48:20Z

-1

I think you want is that these two are concatenated as a single cell array. Try using this code, works for me.

'x = [{start}, {finish}];'

answered Sep 29, 2015 at 8:48

Rizwan Asif

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2 Comments

Hoki Over a year ago

the example variable finish was intended to be the output (the end result). It is not supposed to be part of the inputs.

Rizwan Asif Over a year ago

Simple replace 'X' by 'finish'

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