I want to read a string in Matlab (not an external text file) which has numerical values separated by commas, such as
a = {'1,2,3'}
and I'd like to store it in a vector as numbers. Is there any function which does that? I only find processes and functions used to do that with text files.
I think you're looking for sscanf
A = sscanf(str,formatSpec) reads data from str, converts it according
to the format specified by formatSpec, and returns the results in an
array. str is either a character array or a string scalar.
You can try the str2num function:
vec = str2num('1,2,3')
If you have to use the cell a, per your example, it would be: vec=str2num(a{1})
There are some security warnings in the documentation to consider so be cognizant of how your code is being employed.
Another, more flexible, option is textscan. It can handle strings as well as file handles.
Here's an example:
cellResult = textscan('1,2,3', '%f','delimiter',',');
vec = cellResult{1};
I will use the eval function to "evaluate" the vector. If that is the structure, I will also use the cell2mat to get the '1,2,3' text (this can be approached by other methods too.
% Generate the variable "a" that contains the "vector"
a = {'1,2,3'};
% Generate the vector using the eval function
myVector = eval(['[' cell2mat(a) ']']);
Let me know if this solution works for you
Related
I have a few lines of text like this:
abc
def
ghi
and I want to assign these multiple lines to a Matlab variable for further processing.
I am copying these from very large text file and want to process it in Matlab Instead of saving the text into a file and then reading line by line for processing.
I tried to handle the above text lines as single string but am getting an error whilst trying to assign to a variable:
x = 'abc
def
ghi'
Error:
x = 'abc
|
Error: String is not terminated properly.
Any suggestions which could help me understand and solve the issue will be highly appreciated.
I frequently do this, namely copy text from elsewhere which I want to hard-code into a MATLAB script (in my case it's generally SQL code I want to manipulate and call from MATLAB).
To achieve this I have a helper function in clipboard2cellstr.m defined as follows:
function clipboard2cellstr
str = clipboard('paste');
str = regexprep(str, '''', ''''''); % Double any single quotes
strs = regexp(str, '\s*\r?\n\r?', 'split');
cs = sprintf('{\n''%s''\n}', strjoin(strs, sprintf('''\n''')));
clipboard('copy', cs);
disp(cs)
disp('(Copied to Clipboard)')
end
I then copy the text using Ctrl-c (or however) and run clipboard2cellstr. This changes the contents of the clipboard to something I can paste into the MATLAB editor using Ctrl-v (or however).
For example, copying this line
and this line
and this one, and then running the function generates this:
{
'For example, copying this line'
'and this line'
'and this one, and then running the function generates this:'
}
which is valid MATLAB which can be pasted directly in.
Your error is because you ended the line when MATLAB was expecting a closing quote character. You must use array notation to have multi-line or multi-element arrays.
You can assign like this if you use array notation
x = ['abc'
'def'
'hij']
>> x = 3×3 char array
Note: with this method, your rows must have the same number of characters, as you are really dealing with a character array. You can think of a character array like a numeric matrix, hence why it must be "rectangular".
If you have MATLAB R2016b or newer, you can use the string data type. This uses double quotes "..." rather than single quotes '...', and can be multi-line. You must still use array notation:
x = ["abc"
"def"
"hijk"]
>> x = 3×1 string array
We can have different numbers of characters in each line, as this is simply a 3 element string array, not a character array.
Alternatively, use a cell array of character arrays (or strings)
x = {'abc'
'def'
'hijk'}
>> x = 3×1 cell array
Again, you can have character arrays or strings of different lengths within a cell array.
In all of the above examples, a newline is simply for readability and can be replaced by a semi-colon ; to denote the next line of the array.
The option you choose will depend on what you want to do with the text. If you're reading from a file, I would suggest the string array or the cell array, as they can deal with different length lines. For backwards compatibility, use a cell array. You may find cellfun relevant for operating on cell arrays. For native string operations, use a string array.
I have an abstract class Writer which allows clients to write into something. Could be the screen, could be a file. Now, I try to create a derived class to write into a string.
I have two problems with the denoted line in method write(...):
It's probably very inefficient. Is there something like a string buffer in Matlab?
It writes escape sequences like \n plain into the string, instead of taking their actual meaning.
How can I get the denoted line properly?
Code:
classdef StringTextWriter < Writer
properties
str;
end
methods
function this = StringTextWriter()
% Init the write-target which is a string in our case.
% (Other Writer classes would maybe open a file.)
this.str = '';
end
function write(this, val)
% Write to writer target.
% (Other Writer classes would maybe use fprinf here for file write.)
% ?????????????????????????????
this.str = [this.str val]; % How to do this properly?
% ?????????????????????????????
end
end
end
To answer your questions point by point:
The closest notion to a string buffer would be a string cell. Instead of:
str = '';
str = [strbuf, 'abc\n'];
str = [strbuf, 'def\n'];
str = [strbuf, 'ghi\n'];
%// and so on...
one may use
strbuf = {};
strbuf{end+1} = 'abc\n';
strbuf{end+1} = 'def\n';
strbuf{end+1} = 'ghi\n';
%// and so on...
str = sprintf([strbuf{:}]); %// careful about percent signs and single quotes in string
the drawback being that you have to reconstruct the string every time you ask for it. This can be alleviated by setting a modified flag every time you add strings to the end of strbuf, resetting it every time you concatenate the strings, and memoizing the result of concatenation in the last line (rebuild if modified, or last result if not).
Further improvement can be achieved by choosing a better strategy for growing the strbuf cell array; probably this would be effective if you have a lot of write method calls.
The escape sequences are really linked to the <?>printf family and not to the string literals, so MATLAB in general doesn't care about them, but sprintf in particular might.
I am trying to produce the following:The new values of x and y are -4 and 7, respectively, using the disp and num2str commands. I tried to do this disp('The new values of x and y are num2str(x) and num2str(y) respectively'), but it gave num2str instead of the appropriate values. What should I do?
Like Colin mentioned, one option would be converting the numbers to strings using num2str, concatenating all strings manually and feeding the final result into disp. Unfortunately, it can get very awkward and tedious, especially when you have a lot of numbers to print.
Instead, you can harness the power of sprintf, which is very similar in MATLAB to its C programming language counterpart. This produces shorter, more elegant statements, for instance:
disp(sprintf('The new values of x and y are %d and %d respectively', x, y))
You can control how variables are displayed using the format specifiers. For instance, if x is not necessarily an integer, you can use %.4f, for example, instead of %d.
EDIT: like Jonas pointed out, you can also use fprintf(...) instead of disp(sprintf(...)).
Try:
disp(['The new values of x and y are ', num2str(x), ' and ', num2str(y), ', respectively']);
You can actually omit the commas too, but IMHO they make the code more readable.
By the way, what I've done here is concatenated 5 strings together to form one string, and then fed that single string into the disp function. Notice that I essentially concatenated the string using the same syntax as you might use with numerical matrices, ie [x, y, z]. The reason I can do this is that matlab stores character strings internally AS numeric row vectors, with each character denoting an element. Thus the above operation is essentially concatenating 5 numeric row vectors horizontally!
One further point: Your code failed because matlab treated your num2str(x) as a string and not as a function. After all, you might legitimately want to print "num2str(x)", rather than evaluate this using a function call. In my code, the first, third and fifth strings are defined as strings, while the second and fourth are functions which evaluate to strings.
I have a binary <<"a,b,c">> and I would like to extract the information from this binary.
So I would like to have something like A=a, B=b and so on.
I need a general approach on this because the binary string always changes.
So it could be <<"aaa","bbb","ccc">>...
I tried to generate a list
erlang:binary_to_list(<<"a","b","c">>)
but I get string as a result.
"abc"
Thank you.
You did use the right method.
binary_to_list(Binary) -> [char()]
Returns a list of integers which correspond to the bytes of Binary.
There is no string type in Erlang: http://www.erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/data_types.html#id63119. The console just displays the lists in string representation as a courtesy, if all elements are in printable ASCII range.
You should read Erlang's "Bit Syntax Expressions" documentation to understand how to work on binaries.
Do not convert the whole binary into a list if you don't need it in list representation!
To extract the first three bytes you could use
<<A, B, C, Rest/binary>> = <<"aaa","bbb","ccc">>.
If you want to iterate over the binary data, you can use binary comprehension.
<< <<(F(X))>> || <<X>> <= <<"aaa","bbb","ccc">> >>.
Pattern matching is possible, too:
test(<<A, Tail/binary>>, Accu) -> test(Tail, Accu+A);
test(_, Accu) -> Accu.
882 = test(<<"aaa","bbb","ccc">>, 0).
Even for reading one UTF-8 character at once. So to convert a binary UTF-8 string into Erlang's "list of codepoints" format, you could use:
test(<<A/utf8, Tail/binary>>, Accu) -> test(Tail, [A|Accu]);
test(_, Accu) -> lists:reverse(Accu).
[97,97,97,600,99,99,99] = test(<<"aaa", 16#0258/utf8, "ccc">>, "").
(Note that `<<"aaa","bbb","ccc">> = <<"aaabbbccc">>. Don't actually use the last code snipped but the linked method.)
Is there any way to replace a character at position N in a string in Lua.
This is what I've come up with so far:
function replace_char(pos, str, r)
return str:sub(pos, pos - 1) .. r .. str:sub(pos + 1, str:len())
end
str = replace_char(2, "aaaaaa", "X")
print(str)
I can't use gsub either as that would replace every capture, not just the capture at position N.
Strings in Lua are immutable. That means, that any solution that replaces text in a string must end up constructing a new string with the desired content. For the specific case of replacing a single character with some other content, you will need to split the original string into a prefix part and a postfix part, and concatenate them back together around the new content.
This variation on your code:
function replace_char(pos, str, r)
return str:sub(1, pos-1) .. r .. str:sub(pos+1)
end
is the most direct translation to straightforward Lua. It is probably fast enough for most purposes. I've fixed the bug that the prefix should be the first pos-1 chars, and taken advantage of the fact that if the last argument to string.sub is missing it is assumed to be -1 which is equivalent to the end of the string.
But do note that it creates a number of temporary strings that will hang around in the string store until garbage collection eats them. The temporaries for the prefix and postfix can't be avoided in any solution. But this also has to create a temporary for the first .. operator to be consumed by the second.
It is possible that one of two alternate approaches could be faster. The first is the solution offered by Paŭlo Ebermann, but with one small tweak:
function replace_char2(pos, str, r)
return ("%s%s%s"):format(str:sub(1,pos-1), r, str:sub(pos+1))
end
This uses string.format to do the assembly of the result in the hopes that it can guess the final buffer size without needing extra temporary objects.
But do beware that string.format is likely to have issues with any \0 characters in any string that it passes through its %s format. Specifically, since it is implemented in terms of standard C's sprintf() function, it would be reasonable to expect it to terminate the substituted string at the first occurrence of \0. (Noted by user Delusional Logic in a comment.)
A third alternative that comes to mind is this:
function replace_char3(pos, str, r)
return table.concat{str:sub(1,pos-1), r, str:sub(pos+1)}
end
table.concat efficiently concatenates a list of strings into a final result. It has an optional second argument which is text to insert between the strings, which defaults to "" which suits our purpose here.
My guess is that unless your strings are huge and you do this substitution frequently, you won't see any practical performance differences between these methods. However, I've been surprised before, so profile your application to verify there is a bottleneck, and benchmark potential solutions carefully.
You should use pos inside your function instead of literal 1 and 3, but apart from this it looks good. Since Lua strings are immutable you can't really do much better than this.
Maybe
"%s%s%s":format(str:sub(1,pos-1), r, str:sub(pos+1, str:len())
is more efficient than the .. operator, but I doubt it - if it turns out to be a bottleneck, measure it (and then decide to implement this replacement function in C).
With luajit, you can use the FFI library to cast the string to a list of unsigned charts:
local ffi = require 'ffi'
txt = 'test'
ptr = ffi.cast('uint8_t*', txt)
ptr[1] = string.byte('o')