Covert a string to an array of individual characters.

I apologize if my question is trivial.

I have the following datasets.The letters in each dataset represent student names enrolled in each course :

Course1=['A','B','C','E','F','G','I','P','Q'];
Course2=['B','E','F','H','K','Q','R','S','T','U','V','Z'];
Course3=['C','E','G','H','J','K','O','Q','Z'];

So for example

Course1orCourse2 = union(Course1,Course2)

Course1orCourse2 = 'ABCEFGHIKPQRSTUVZ'

Course1andCourse2 = intersect(Course1,Course2)

Course1andCourse2 = 'BEFQ'

How can I get an output in the form ['A', 'B', 'C', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'K', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'Z'] and ['B', 'E', 'F', 'G']? Thank you very much?

[Stephen23]

Note that square brackets are a concatentation operator (not a list operator like in some other langauges), so your examples are just complicated ways of writing character vectors. For example, this code:

Course1 = ['A','B','C','E','F','G','I','P','Q'];

is just a longer way of writing this equivalent character vector:

Course1 = 'ABCEFGIPQ';

The same applies to your requested outputs, e.g. this:

['A', 'B', 'C', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'K', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'Z'] 

is exactly equivalent to this simple character vector:

'ABCEFGHIKPQRSTUVZ'

And that is already what UNION and INTERSECT are giving you: character vectors which consist of lots of individual characters. Understanding what square brackets actually do, and what character vectors are, is very important when using MATLAB:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/represent-text-with-character-and-string-arrays.html

Answer 1

[Dyuman Joshi]

If you need every alphabet presented individually, you will have to define them as strings.

Either manually define each input with double inverted commas

Course1=["A","B","C","E","F","G","I","P","Q"]; %similarly for Course2 and Course3

or use compose on the existing data -

Course1=['A','B','C','E','F','G','I','P','Q'];
Course2=['B','E','F','H','K','Q','R','S','T','U','V','Z'];
Course3=['C','E','G','H','J','K','O','Q','Z'];
Course1=compose("%s",Course1')';
Course2=compose("%s",Course2')';
Course3=compose("%s",Course3')'

Course3 = 1×9 string array
    "C"    "E"    "G"    "H"    "J"    "K"    "O"    "Q"    "Z"

Course1orCourse2 = union(Course1,Course2)

Course1orCourse2 = 1×17 string array
    "A"    "B"    "C"    "E"    "F"    "G"    "H"    "I"    "K"    "P"    "Q"    "R"    "S"    "T"    "U"    "V"    "Z"

Course1andCourse2 = intersect(Course1,Course2)

Course1andCourse2 = 1×4 string array
    "B"    "E"    "F"    "Q"