How to remove single quotes around the string

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Mekala balaji
Mekala balaji on 14 Aug 2017
Edited: Stephen23 on 14 May 2020
Hi,
I have my string (which is actually a header line read from CSV file). single string in a row separated by somas as below:
name1,name2,name3,name10
I tried with both "strsplit and regexp" to split the string at "comma" and save to another variable as a column, but it giving me single quotes around each substring as follows:
'name1'
'name2'
'name3'
'name10'
my desired output:
name1
name2
name3
name10
Please someone help, many thanks in advance.
  3 Comments
Harold Rocha
Harold Rocha on 28 Feb 2018
There is a typographical problem if you want to copy the output into something. I would be happy to find out how to remove the apostrophes/single quotes as well.
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 28 Feb 2018
>> T = strsplit('name1,name2,name3,name10',',');
>> fprintf('%s\n', T{:})
name1
name2
name3
name10

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Answers (4)

dbmn
dbmn on 14 Aug 2017
In Matlab, Strings (and Substrings) begin and end with the ' character. See Matlab Documentation for Char ans Strings
This character is not embedded in the string itself, but helps you figure out that you deal with a variable of datatyp char
  • If you just want to work with them - don't worry, the ' will not be "baked" into your data
  • if you want to output that data, you could use something like:
fprintf('%s\n', input{:})
  • Oh and if you want to export to excel, dont worry, Matlab takes care of your '. The following code produces a file without the '
xlswrite('myfile', {'asd', 1, 2; 'qwe', 3, 4})
  3 Comments
Stephen23
Stephen23 on 14 Aug 2017
Edited: Stephen23 on 14 Aug 2017
"Is it possible to store into a variable using fprintf('%s\n', input{:})"
Not really. If you read the fprintf documentation it states: "Write data to text file": how do you imagine that writing to file has anything to do with assigning a value to a variable? fprintf could print something to the command window, but that does not create a variable either.
Assining values to variables is covered very well in the MATLAB Introductory Tutorials, which are highly recommended for all beginners:
You should also read this:
Jan
Jan on 14 Aug 2017
Sorry, dbmn, I did not see your answer, when I typed mine. This is strange, because yours is 2 hours older.

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Jan
Jan on 14 Aug 2017
Edited: Jan on 14 Aug 2017
The quotes do not belong to the data. They are just added, when you display the cell string in the command window. Try this:
str = 'name1,name2';
cstr = strsplit(str, ',')
This is shown in the command window:
cstr =
1×2 cell array
'name1' 'name2'
But the strings, the elements of the cell string, do not contain the quotes:
fprintf('%s\n', cstr{1});
or
any(cstr{1} == char(39)) % 0: No, the string does not contain a quote character
Please contain, what exactly "desired output" means: Do you mean the output to the command window or the contents of the variable?
  5 Comments
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 29 Jul 2019
MATLAB treats character vectors as vectors of values when used as indices, with each character being treated as its underlying utf16 ordinate position.
LC = 1:255;
LC('A' :'Z') = 'a':'z' ;
S = 'Hi There!'
LC(S)
Will produce 'hi there' by way of array indexing.
If you want to do the kind of kludge that mention then matlab provides eval()
I doubt that you will find any programming languages (except awk and derivatives) in which indexing with '1' would be treated the same as if you had indexed with 1
Stephen23
Stephen23 on 14 May 2020
Edited: Stephen23 on 14 May 2020
"I do precisely the same sort of shenanigans all the time in other systems: R, Python, plpgsql, JavaScript... even VBA. "
Using a string as a list index with IPython throws an error:
L = [1,2,3,4]
L['1']
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<ipython-input-2-69e97d48164a>", line 1, in <module>
L['1']
TypeError: list indices must be integers or slices, not str
Does not work in R either:
x <- c(1,2,3)
x["1"]
[1] NA
R does allow the elements to be named, but then those are arbitrary names which do not correspond to indices.
Apparently JavaScript and VBA do permit using strings of numbers as indices, VBA even silently truncates any fractional part... the horror!

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Jim Hokanson
Jim Hokanson on 13 May 2020
Since I stumbled across this when looking at ways of copying variables, specifically cell arrays of strings, from Matlab into Excel without single quotes I'll provide that solution here. With referencing a CSV file my guess is that the author was asking that question as well, although perhaps not as clearly ...
Converting a cell array of strings to a string array will all you to copy into Excel without the quotes.
A = {'name1'
'name2'
'name3'
'name10'};
B = string(A);
open B
%Right click in the variable editor and copy, then paste into Excel

Peng He
Peng He on 23 Jan 2019
sprintf('%s\n',string(Your_array))
  1 Comment
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 23 Jan 2019
If you were going to do that you might as well just do
YourArray = 'name1,name2,name3,name10';
YourArray(YourArray == ',') = char(10);
or
YourArray = strrep(YourArray, ',', char(10))
or
YourArray = regexprep(YourArray, ',', '\n')

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