print a cell array as .txt in Matlab

Question

I have a cell array that needs to be printed in a .txt file according to a specific format. I have tried some of the online help (including matlab central dlmcell but even that is not giving me the desired answer. Delimiter is \t.

cellarray = { ...
        'AAPL' '2/20/2011' 100.5 
        'MSFT' '2/15/2011' 43.4551
            } ;

The output should be in a .txt file with the following format: (using tab delimiter)

"AAPL"    "2/20/2011"    100.5
"MSFT"    "2/15/2011"    43.4551

The cell will have minimum of 8000 rows and a maximum of 15000. No rows would have empty columns. Is a vectorized solution possible? Shall appreciate your help.

Nzbuu · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-19 18:35:19Z

7

The following will work for your example:

C = cellarray.';
fid = fopen('file.dlm', 'wt');
fprintf(fid, '"%s"\t"%s"\t%g\n', C{:});
fclose(fid);

MATLAB reuses the formatting string until it runs out of inputs. In principle, you could construct the formatting string first:

fstr = '';
for ic = 1:size(cellarray,2)
   switch class(cellarray{1,ic})
       case 'char'
           fstr = [fstr '"%s"'];
       otherwise
           % Assume numeric
           fstr = [fstr '%g'];
   end
   if ic < size(cellarray,2), fstr = [fstr '\t']; else fstr = [fstr '\n']; end
end

Then

C = cellarray.';
fid = fopen('file.dlm', 'wt');
fprintf(fid, fstr, C{:});
fclose(fid);

answered Dec 19, 2011 at 18:35

Nzbuu

5,2511 gold badge32 silver badges53 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

4 Comments

Maddy Over a year ago

thanks. But both the solutions give the same errror -> Error 1 ??? Cell contents reference from a non-cell array object. Error in ==> fprintf( fid, '"%s"\t"%s"\t%g\n', C{:} ); Error 2

Maddy Over a year ago

switch class(cellarray{1,ic})

Nzbuu Over a year ago

That means that cellarray isn't a cell array.

Maddy Over a year ago

u r right Nzbuu...there was a small bug in my actual code.. my bad! sorry. thanks..it works great.

yuk · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-04 18:19:54Z

3

I often use combination of DLMWRITE and XLSWRITE. DLMWRITE is used to make a text file, so XLSWRITE will not generate the file in Excel format, but will leave it as a text.

filename = 'file.txt';
dlmwrite(filename, 1)
xlswrite(filename, cellarray)

Note that on OS where COM is not available (like Linux) XLSWRITE write to text, so you don't need the call to DLMWRITE.

UPDATE

This method does not work anymore with the latest versions of MATLAB (since probably R2012b). xlswrite always writes to Excel-formatted file.

However, since R2013b MATLAB introduced TABLES, and WRITETABLE function works great if cell array can be converted to a table (check CELL2TABLE function).

edited Dec 4, 2013 at 18:19

answered Dec 19, 2011 at 18:33

yuk

19.9k14 gold badges70 silver badges106 bronze badges

3 Comments

Maddy Over a year ago

thanks Yuk. It works fine but it takes 18 seconds for printing out 3 cols for 15k rows. I am hoping for a faster alternative. I'm not even sure if it is possible now..

Nzbuu Over a year ago

xlswrite is pretty slow because it needs to launch and connect to Excel first. But that's probably more than a couple of seconds.

RnD Over a year ago

This is a great way to write the output without going through the messy for loosps...thanks

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

print a cell array as .txt in Matlab

2 Answers 2

4 Comments

3 Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

4 Comments

3 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related