How to create a sub-cell from a cell array in Matlab?

Question

Lets say I have following cell array data in Matlab:

>> data = {'first', 1; 'second', 2; 'third', 3}

data = 

    'first'     [1]
    'second'    [2]
    'third'     [3]

Then I want to create a new cell array which has only the first column data. I tried the following but got only the first value instead.

>> column_1 = data{:,1}

column_1 =

first

But what I would like to get as output is:

>> column_1 = {'first';'second';'third'}

column_1 = 

    'first'
    'second'
    'third'

How can I create a sub-cell from first column of data cell array?

Tommaso Belluzzo · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-22 20:57:38Z

2

You have to use round parentheses indexing instead of curly braces indexing, like this:

data(:,1)

Output:

ans =
      3×1 cell array
      'first'
      'second'
      'third'

Basically, the purpose of curly braces is to retrieve the underlying content of cells and present a different behavior. For extracting subsets of cells you need to use round parentheses. For more details, refer to this page of the official Matlab documentation.

edited Feb 22, 2018 at 20:57

answered Feb 22, 2018 at 20:51

Tommaso Belluzzo

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