need guidance with basic function creation in MATLAB - string

I have to write a MATLAB function with the following description:
function counts = letterStatistics(filename, allowedChar, N)
This function is supposed to open a text file specified by filename and read its entire contents. The contents will be parsed such that any character that isn’t in allowedChar is removed. Finally it will return a count of all N-symbol combinations in the parsed text. This function should be stored in a file name “letterStatistics.m” and I made a list of some commands and things of how the function should be organized according to my professors' lecture notes:
Begin the function by setting the default value of N to 1 in case:
a. The user specifies a 0 or negative value of N.
b. The user doesn’t pass the argument N into the function, i.e., counts = letterStatistics(filename, allowedChar)
Using the fopen function, open the file filename for reading in text mode.
Using the function fscanf, read in all the contents of the opened file into a string variable.
I know there exists a MATLAB function to turn all letters in a string to lower case. Since my analysis will disregard case, I have to use this function on the string of text.
Parse this string variable as follows (use logical indexing or regular expressions – do not use for loops):
a. We want to remove all newline characters without this occurring:
e.g.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
In my younger and more vulnerableyears my father gave me some advicethat I’ve been turning over in my mindever since.
Replace all newline characters (special character \n) with a single space: ' '.
b. We will treat hyphenated words as two separate words, hence do the same for hyphens '-'.
c. Remove any character that is not in allowedChar. Hint: use regexprep with an empty string '' as an argument for replace.
d. Any sequence of two or more blank spaces should be replaced by a single blank space.
Use the provided permsRep function, to create a matrix of all possible N-symbol combinations of the symbols in allowedChar.
Using the strfind function, count all the N-symbol combinations in the parsed text into an array counts. Do not loop through each character in your parsed text as you would in a C program.
Close the opened file using fclose.
HERE IS MY QUESTION: so as you can see i have made this list of what the function is, what it should do, and using which commands (fclose etc.). the trouble is that I'm aware that closing the file involves use of 'fclose' but other than that I'm not sure how to execute #8. Same goes for the whole function creation. I have a vague idea of how to create a function using what commands but I'm unable to produce the actual code.. how should I begin? Any guidance/hints would seriously be appreciated because I'm having programmers' block and am unable to start!

I think that you are new to matlab, so the documentation may be complicated. The root of the problem is the basic understanding of file I/O (input/output) I guess. So the thing is that when you open the file using fopen, matlab returns a pointer to that file, which is generally called a file ID. When you call fclose you want matlab to understand that you want to close that file. So what you have to do is to use fclose with the correct file ID.
fid = open('test.txt');
fprintf(fid,'This is a test.\n');
fclose(fid);
fid = 0; % Optional, this will make it clear that the file is not open,
% but it is not necessary since matlab will send a not open message anyway
Regarding the function creation the syntax is something like this:
function out = myFcn(x,y)
z = x*y;
fprintf('z=%.0f\n',z); % Print value of z in the command window
out = z>0;
This is a function that checks if two numbers are positive and returns true they are. If not it returns false. This may not be the best way to do this test, but it works as example I guess.
Please comment if this is not what you want to know.

Related

Having some issues with Perl Splitting and Merging Functions

First and foremost, I'm not familiar with Perl at all. I've been studying C++ primarily for the last 1/2 year. I'm in a class now that that is teaching Linux commands, and we have short little topics on languages used in Linux, including Perl, which is totally throwing me for a loop (no pun intended). I have a text file that contains a bunch of random numbers separated by spaces and tabs, maybe even newlines, that gets read into the program via a filehandle. I'm supposed to write 2 lines of code that split the lines of numbers and merge them into one array, inside of a foreach loop. I'm not looking for an answer, just a nudge in the right direction. I've been trying different things for multiple hours and feel totally silly I can't get it, I'm totally lost with the syntax. Its just a bit odd not working inside a compiler and out of my comfort zone working outside of C++. I really appreciate it. I've included a few photos. Basically, the code we are writing it just to store the numbers and the rest of the program will determine the smallest number and sum of all numbers. Mine is currently incorrect because I'm not sure what to do. In the output photo, it will display all the numbers being entered in via the text file, so you can see them.
Several things to fix here. First of all, please don't post screenshots of your sample data or code, as it makes it impossible to copy and paste to test your code or data. Post your code/data by indenting it with four spaces and a newline preceding the code block.
Add use strict; in your script. This should be lesson 0 in your class. After that add my to all variable declarations.
To populate #all_numbers with contents of each line's numbers, without using push, you can use something like this:
foreach my $line (#output_lines)
{
my #numbers = split /\s/, $line;
#all_numbers = (#all_numbers, #numbers);
}
You say you're "not looking for an answer," so here's your nudge:
You're almost there. You split each line well (using split/\s/) and store the numeric values in #all_numbers. However, notice that each time around in the loop, you replace (using the assignment, #all_numbers = ...) the whole contents of #all_numbers with the numbers you found in the current line. Effectively, you're throwing away everything you've stored from the previous lines.
Instead, you want to add to #all_numbers, not replace #all_numbers. Have a look at the push() function for how to do this.
NB: Your split() call is fine, but it's more customary to use split(' ', $line) in this case. (See split(): you can use a single space, ' ', instead of the pattern, /\s/, when you want to split on any whitespace.)
I hope you need to store the all splitting element into array, so you looking for push function.
foreach $line (#input_lines)
{
push(#all_numbers,split(/\s/,$line));
}
Your problem is, in every iteration, the splitted value is over written in an array not to append together. For example,
#array = qw(one two three);
#array = qw(five four seven);
print "#array";
output is five four seven not the one two three five four seven because this is reinitialize with a new values. You want to append the new values in the array in before or after use unshift or push
for example
#array = qw(one two three);
push(#array,qw(five four seven));
Another way:
my #all_numbers = map { split ' ', $_ } #output_lines;
See http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/map.html

Parse Fortran String Like A File

I want to pass a string from C to Fortran and then process it line-by-line as if I was reading a file. Is this possible?
Example String - contains newlines
File description: this file contains stuff
3 Values
1 Description
2 Another description
3 More text
Then, I would like to parse the string line-by-line, like a file. Similar to this:
subroutine READ_STR(str, len)
character str(len),desc*70
read(str,'(a)') desc
read(str,*) n
do 10 i=1,n
read(str,*) parm(i)
10 continue
Not without significant "manual" intervention. There are a couple of issues:
The newline character has no special meaning in an internal file. Records in an internal file correspond to elements in an array. You would either need to first manually preprocess your character scalar into an array, or use a single READ that skipped over the newline characters.
If you did process the string into an array, then internal files do not maintain a file position between parent READ statements. You would need to manually track the current record yourself, or process the entire array with a single READ statement that accessed multiple records.
If you have variable width fields, then writing a format specification to process everything in a single READ could be problematic, though this depends on the details of the input.

Renaming a structure in MATLAB using an existing string

I have a structure in MATLAB called dat. I want to rename dat as an existing string.
Existing_str='NewName'
$(Existing_str)=dat
This fails as I don't think MATLAB lets me use the dollar sign in this way. The code below creates a copy of dat literally called Existing_str and destroys the Existing_str in the process.
Existing_str=dat
While the code below generates a collosal empty structure which clearly is not a copy!
eval(Existing_str)=dat
In the task I am actually trying to perform I don't know the name of the existing_str in advance so that is not a solution.
You were almost there with your `eval'. What you want is:
eval([Existing_str '=dat;']);
This works because you're composing a string inside your square brackets. If you just looked at the resulting string, it would look like NewName=dat; The eval command simply tells Matlab to evaluate the string as if you typed it into the command line.
You can use dynamic field naming (Bas's suggestion), and avoid eval:
For example, if you have just loaded a structure dat from a file 'somefile.ext' with some custom parsing function:
filename = 'somefile.ext'; % presume you actually have a list of files from dir or ls
dat = yourfunction(filename);
[~, name, ~] = fileparts(filename);
alldat.(name)=dat;
This is equivalent to:
alldat.somefile = dat;
Except that we've just automatically taken the name from the filename (in this case just by stripping off the path/extension, but you could do other things depending on the pattern of the filename).
The bonus of this is that you can then, say, with a structure that has fields alldat.file1, alldata.file2, alldat.file3, all of which have a subfield, say, size do things like this:
names = fieldnames(alldat)
for n = 1:length(names)
alldat.(names{n}).mean = mean(alldata.(names{n}).size);
end
Every sub-structure now has a field, mean, which contains the mean of the data. If you had a bunch of different named structures you would need to eval everything you wanted to do to them collectively, and the code becomes difficult to read and maintain.
The other option is a cell array. Here's an easy trick:
dat = % whatever you do to make this structure
alldat{end+1} = dat;
This just appends the new dat onto the end of an existing cell array. {end+1} ensures it doesn't overwrite existing data.

Same for loop, giving out two different results using .write()

this is my first time asking a question so let me know if I am doing something wrong (post wise)
I am trying to create a function that writes into a .txt but i seem to get two very different results between calling it from within a module, and writing the same loop in the shell directly. The code is as follows:
def function(para1, para2): #para1 is a string that i am searching for within para2. para2 is a list of strings
with open("str" + para1 +".txt", 'a'. encoding = 'utf-8') as file:
#opens a file with certain naming convention
n = 0
for word in para2:
if word == para1:
file.write(para2[n-1]+'\n')
print(para2[n-1]) #intentionally included as part of debugging
n+=1
function("targetstr". targettext)
#target str is the phrase I am looking for, targettext is the tokenized text I am
#looking through. this is in the form of a list of strings, that is the output of
#another function, and has already been 'declared' as a variable
when I define this function in the shell, I get the correct words appearing. However, when i call this same function through a module(in the shell), nothing appears in the shell, and the text file shows a bunch of numbers (eg: 's93161), and no new lines.
I have even gone to the extent of including a print statement right after declaration of the function in the module, and commented everything but the print statement, and yet nothing appears in the shell when I call it. However, the numbers still appear in the text file.
I am guessing that there is a problem with how I have defined the parameters or how i cam inputting the parameters when I call the function.
As a reference, here is the desired output:
‘She
Ashley
there
Kitty
Coates
‘Let
let
that
PS: Sorry if this is not very clear as I have very limited knowledge on speaking python
I have found the solution to issue. Turns out that I need to close the shell and restart everything before the compiler recognizes the changes made to the function in the module. Thanks to those who took a look at the issue, and those who tried to help.

automating string and number concatenation

I'm having some trouble automating a matlab script which should prompt the user for the variable they are interested in, as well as the date range they want. I then want the script to concatenate their answers within a naming convention for the file they will ultimately load.
variable=input('please input variable of interest');
% temp
start=input('please state the start date in the form yymmdd: ');
%130418
enddate=input('please state the end date in the form yymmdd: ');
%140418
file=sprintf('%s_dailydata_%d_%d.csv',variable,start,enddate);
%so I thought 'file' would look like: temp_dailydata_130418_140418.csv
vardata=load(file);
the two numbers representing the dates are not causing any issues, but the fact that 'variable' is a string is. I know if I put apostrophes before and after 'temp' when I'm promted, it will work, but I have to assume that the end user won't know to do this. I tried putting curly braces around 'please input your variable..', but that didn't help either. Obviously this approach assumes that the date being requested exists in a filename.
Can anyone offer any advice? Perhaps the sprintf function is not the best option here?
Don't use 'end' as a variable name, it is a reserved name and using it could create conflicts with any function or logic block you're defining.
If you know your input is going to be a string: from the documentation for input()
str = input(prompt,'s')
Returns the entered text as a MATLAB string, without evaluating expressions.
As for knowing whether or not the file exists, that's something you'd have to incorporate some error logic for. Either a try/catch block with your load() call or you could use uigetfile() to get the filename.

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