How to convert a 1x1 table coining a list of N names into a Nx1 string of names

I have a 1x1 table T element which contains several names as the following

T = { 'Aaaa; Bbbb; Cccc; Dddd' }

I would like to convert it into a 4x1 string array of 4 names as

TT = ["Aaaa" ; "Bbbb" ; "Cccc" ; "Dddd"]

so that TT(1)="Aaaa", etc.

how can I do it?

Answer 1

[Lokesh]

Hi Nicola,

It appears that T is a cell array containing a single string. To achieve the conversion to a 4x1 string array 'TT' as described, you can follow these steps in MATLAB:

1. Extract the string from the cell array: First, access the string stored in the cell array 'T'.
2. Split the string: Use the 'split' function to split the string into parts based on the semicolon delimiter. Since the input is a character vector, the output of 'split' will be a cell array of character vectors.
3. Convert to a string array: Finally, convert the cell array of character vectors to a string array.

Here's how you can do it:

% Given cell array T 
T = {'Aaaa; Bbbb; Cccc; Dddd'}; 
% Extract the string from the cell array 
str = T{1}; 
% Split the string into parts based on the semicolon 
parts = split(str, '; '); 
% Convert the cell array of character vectors to a string array 
TT = string(parts); 
% If you need TT to be a 4x1 column vector explicitly 
TT = reshape(TT, [], 1);

Refer to the following documentation to know more about 'split':

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/split.html

[Dyuman Joshi]

Your code has a bit of redundancy. Here's a cleaned up version -

T = {'Aaaa; Bbbb; Cccc; Dddd'}; 
out = string(split(T, '; '))

out = 4x1 string array
    "Aaaa"
    "Bbbb"
    "Cccc"
    "Dddd"

Check the output after each operation you perform and you will catch the redundancies.