Convert cell into double

Hi,

I have a matrix (1050*7) where I want to convert the cell format into a double:

It looks like that:

'0101' '2' '31.1.2013' '5' '5' '1' '23875' '0101' '2' '31.1.2013' '3' '3' '1' '5437' ...

Thanks already!

Answer 1

[Dishant Arora]

If your data follow this strict order and the 3rd column refers to date, try this:

function y = fun(x)
if isnan(str2double(x))
  y = datenum(regexprep(x , '\.' , '-'))
else
  y = str2double(x)
end

% consider testCell as your input cell, run this script

outputMatrix = cellfun(@(x)fun(x) , testCell , 'Un' , 1);

Answer 2

[Julia]

There is the command cell2mat (from the Matlab help):

Combine matrices in the four cells of cell array c into matrix m.

c = {[1],    [2, 3, 4];
     [5; 9], [6, 7, 8; 10, 11, 12]};

m = cell2mat(c)

m is a 3-by-4 matrix:

m =
     1     2     3     4
     5     6     7     8
     9    10    11    12

Answer 3

[Ben11]

If all your entries are numbers you can use cell2mat. Is that the case?

Answer 4

[julro]

Thanks for your response. I tried it but I am getting the error:

all input cell arrays must be same data type. Might be due to the '31.1.2013' in the 3. column...? So that relates to you question - no, not all are numbers.

Best,

Julia

Answer 5

[Star Strider]

It looks like a codes ( e.g. '0101' ) and dates ( e.g. '31.1.2013' ) so a simple conversion is probably not what you want. I would convert it to a table with the cell2table function if your version of MATLAB supports tables.