Hi can any one help me in dealing with strings in MATLAB. For example, the string
A = 'A good looking boy'
how can we store these individual words in arrays and later retrieve any of the words?
As found here, you could use
>> A = 'A good looking boy';
>> C = regexp(A,'[A-z]*', 'match')
C =
'A' 'good' 'looking' 'boy'
so that
>> C{1}
ans =
A
>> C{4}
ans =
boy
>> [C{:}]
ans =
Agoodlookingboy
The most intuitive way would be using strsplit
C = strsplit(A,' ')
However as it is not available in my version I suppose this is only a builtin function in matlab 2013a and above. You can find the documentation here.
If you are using an older version of matlab, you can also choose to get this File Exchange solution, which basically does the same.
You can use the simple function textscan for that:
C = textscan(A,'%s');
C will be a cell array. This function is in Matlab at least since R14.
Related
I'm using Matlab Coder to convert some Matlab code to C++, however I'm having trouble converting intergers to strings.
int2str() is not supported for code generation, so I must find some other way to convert ints to strings. I've tried googling it, without success. Is this even possible?
This can be done manually (very painful, though)
function s = thePainfulInt2Str( n )
s = '';
is_pos = n > 0; % //save sign
n = abs(n); %// work with positive
while n > 0
c = mod( n, 10 ); % get current character
s = [uint8(c+'0'),s]; %// add the character
n = ( n - c ) / 10; %// "chop" it off and continue
end
if ~is_pos
s = ['-',s]; %// add the sign
end
sprintf is another very basic function, so it possibly works in C++ as well:
x = int64(1948)
str = sprintf('%i',x)
It is also the underlying function used by int2str.
According to this comprehensive list of supported functions, as pointed out by Matt in the comments, sprintf is not supported, which is surprising. However there is the undocumented helper function (therefore not in the list) sprintfc which seems to work and can be used equivalently:
str = sprintfc('%i',x)
I use the following workaround to enable sprintf for general use with Matlab Coder:
1) Create the following m-file named "sprintf.m", preferably in a folder NOT on your Matlab path:
function s = sprintf(f, varargin)
if (coder.target('MATLAB'))
s = builtin('sprintf',f,varargin{:});
elseif (coder.target('MEX'))
s = builtin('sprintf',f,varargin{:});
else
coder.cinclude('stdio.h');
s = char(zeros(1024,1));
cf = [f,0]; % NULL-terminated string for use in C
coder.ceval('sprintf_s', coder.ref(s(1)), int32(1024), coder.rref(cf(1)), varargin{:});
end
2) Ensure that sprintf is not specified as extrinsic via coder.extrinsic
3) Specify the folder containing the newly created "sprintf.m" as additional include directory when generating code. If you use the codegen function, this can be done via the -I switch. If you use the Coder App, this can be done under "More Settings -> Custom Code -> Additional include directories" from the "Generate" tab.
4) Convert from int to string as follows: s=sprintf('%d',int32(n));
Notes:
The specified "sprintf.m" shadows the built-in sprintf function and executes instead of the built-in function every time you call sprintf from generated code. By placing this file in a folder that is not on the Matlab path, you avoid calling it from other code made to run in Matlab. The coder.target call also helps to navigate back to the built-in function in case this gets called in a normal Matlab session or from a MEX file.
The code above limits the result to 1023 characters (a terminating zero is required at the end). The call to sprintf_s instructs the C++ compiler to throw a runtime exception if the result exceeds this value. This prevents memory corruption that is often only caught much later and is harder to trace back to the offending call. This limit can be modified to your own requirements.
Numeric types must be cast to the correct class before passing them to sprintf, e.g. cast to int32 to match a %d in the format string. This requirement is the same when using fprintf with Matlab Coder. However, in the fprintf case, Matlab Coder catches type errors for you. For sprintf, the C++ compiler may fail or the resulting string may contain errors.
String arguments must be NULL-terminated manually to be used in C calls, as Matlab Coder does not do this automatically (credit to Ryan Livingston for pointing this out). The code above ensures that the format string f is NULL-terminated, but NULL-termination of other string arguments remains the responsibility of the calling function.
This code was tested on a Windows platform with a Visual Studio C++ compiler and Matlab R2016a (Matlab Coder 3.1), but is expected to work in most other environments as well.
Edit: As of MATLAB R2018a, sprintf is supported for code generation by MATLAB Coder.
Pre R2018a Answer
You could also call the C runtime sprintf or snprintf using coder.ceval. This has the benefit of making supporting floating point inputs easy as well. You can also change the formatting as desired by tweaking the format string.
Supposing that your compiler provides snprintf one could use:
function s = cint2str(x)
%#codegen
if coder.target('MATLAB')
s = int2str(x);
else
coder.cinclude('<stdio.h>');
assert(isfloat(x) || isinteger(x), 'x must be a float or an integer');
assert(x == floor(x) && isfinite(x), 'x must be a finite integer value');
if isinteger(x)
switch class(x)
% Set up for Win64, change to match your target
case {'int8','int16','int32'}
fmt = '%d';
case 'int64'
fmt = '%lld';
case {'uint8','uint16','uint32'}
fmt = '%u';
otherwise
fmt = '%llu';
end
else
fmt = '%.0f';
end
% NULL-terminate for C
cfmt = [fmt, 0];
% Set up external C types
nt = coder.opaque('int','0');
szt = coder.opaque('size_t','0');
NULL = coder.opaque('char*','NULL');
% Query length
nt = coder.ceval('snprintf',NULL,szt,coder.rref(cfmt),x);
n = cast(nt,'int32');
ns = n+1; % +1 for trailing null
% Allocate and format
s = coder.nullcopy(blanks(ns));
nt = coder.ceval('snprintf',coder.ref(s),cast(ns,'like',szt),coder.rref(cfmt),x);
assert(cast(nt,'int32') == n, 'Failed to format string');
end
Note that you'll possibly need to tweak the format string to match the hardware on which you're running since this assumes that long long is available and maps 64-bit integers to it.
I have the following array:-
dir=['E','B','R']
I want to find the index of the elemen 'E'.
>> find(dir=='E')
ans =
1
But i want to do the same for an array of strings rather than array of characters like:
dir=['E','G','T','BR']
But there is an error to find 'BR'. I want the output to be 4.
>> find(dir=='BR')
Error using ==
Matrix dimensions must agree.
How to work-around this error?
I recommend you look at the documentation on string (char array) handling in matlab such as here.
What you want to do is work with cell arrays of strings:
dir = {'E','G','T','BR'}
find(ismember(dir,'BR'))
ans = 4
There is a string containing a number in an arbitrary format (e.g., 12, -34.5, and 6.78e-9). The goal is to convert this string into the corresponding number and then convert this number back to a string such that (a) the precision given in the original string is preserved, and (b) the resulting string has an adequate format (probably, the most adequate format is the format of the original string). I thought the problem could be easily solved using str2num and num2str; however, in some cases, MATLAB seems to be mangling the final result as shown below:
>> a = '1e23'
a =
1e23
>> b = str2num(a)
b =
1.0000e+23
>> c = num2str(b)
c =
9.999999999999999e+22
One solution is to use a general format string:
>> c = num2str(b, '%e')
c =
1.000000e+23
However, in this case, the output looks rather cumbersome for numbers of small orders:
>> d = num2str(1, '%e')
d =
1.000000e+00
In most cases, num2str without additional parameters does a pretty good job resulting in a nicely formatted string. The question is: Is there a way to eliminate the 9.999999999999999e+22 problem?
Thank you!
Regards,
Ivan
In general the representation of one input string does not contain enough information to determine the format. Hence (assuming you want to output slightly different numbers and cannot simply store the number in string format), the simplest way would be to try and find a format that you like.
Judging from your comments, I think you will be happy with:
format short g
For large numbers it will give:
x = num2str(1.0000e+23);str2num(x)
ans =
1e+23
And for small numbers:
x = num2str(1);str2num(x)
ans =
1
I'm trying to find the locations where a substring occurs in a cell array in MATLAB. The code below works, but is rather ugly. It seems to me there should be an easier solution.
cellArray = [{'these'} 'are' 'some' 'nicewords' 'and' 'some' 'morewords'];
wordPlaces = cellfun(#length,strfind(cellArray,'words'));
wordPlaces = find(wordPlaces); % Word places is the locations.
cellArray(wordPlaces);
This is similar to, but not the same as this and this.
The thing to do is to encapsulate this idea as a function. Either inline:
substrmatch = #(x,y) ~cellfun(#isempty,strfind(y,x))
findmatching = #(x,y) y(substrmatch(x,y))
Or contained in two m-files:
function idx = substrmatch(word,cellarray)
idx = ~cellfun(#isempty,strfind(word,cellarray))
and
function newcell = findmatching(word,oldcell)
newcell = oldcell(substrmatch(word,oldcell))
So now you can just type
>> findmatching('words',cellArray)
ans =
'nicewords' 'morewords'
I don't know if you would consider it a simpler solution than yours, but regular expressions are a very good general-purpose utility I often use for searching strings. One way to extract the cells from cellArray that contains words with 'words' in them is as follows:
>> matches = regexp(cellArray,'^.*words.*$','match'); %# Extract the matches
>> matches = [matches{:}] %# Remove empty cells
matches =
'nicewords' 'morewords'
I would like to make a list of strings in MATLAB using the example below:
x = ['fun', 'today', 'sunny']
I want to be able to call x(1) and have it return 'fun', but instead I keep getting 'f'.
Also, is there a way to add a string to a list without getting the list giving back a number where the string should be? I have tried using str2double and a few other things. It seems like both of these thing should be possible to do in MATLAB.
The easiest way to store a list of strings that have different lengths is to use cell arrays. For example:
>> x = {'fun', 'today', 'sunny'}; %# Create a cell array of strings
>> x{1} %# Get the string from the first cell
ans =
fun
It's kind of a kludgy workaround, but
x = strsplit('fun.today.sunny', ',')
produces a list with individual, callable strings.