Convert Cell Array into equation

Hi everyone!

I have a simple question and I have already been looking for an answer that suits my problem here in the community but haven't found anything yet so here I go:

I am reading a .csv file with the function readtable and it works perfectly fine, but there is one column were an quation like this is written: 19*32 for example in each cell. What i want is Matlab to just calculate that equation for each cell of the array, to just get one number. For example for the equation above it would be 608. Matlab reads this column as a Cell Array and I already tried the cell2mat function, but that didn't help me unfortunetly....

I have attached a file with an exmaple of the column that I want to solve.

Thank you for your help and best regards from germany

Lukas

[Stephen23]

Slightly more robust would be to use STR2NUM:

T = readtable('matlab_example.csv','Delimiter',',');
V = cellfun(@str2num, T.flaeche_li_2)

V = 28×1

540 360 324 720 432 414 810 468 540 450

Answer 1

[Voss]

If C is a cell array containing a MATLAB expression in each cell, then the following code will evaluate the expressions and return a vector of results:

V = cellfun(@(x)eval(x),C);

[ga97cad]

Thank you, Benjamin!! your solution helped me to solve my problem and I marked it as accepted!! best regards, Lukas

Answer 2

[Dave B]

I think you could use a combination of cellfun (to run on each cell) and eval (to evaluate the expression):

a=readtable('matlab_example.csv','Delimiter',',');
a.evaluated=cellfun(@eval,a.flaeche_li_2);
head(a)

ans = 8×2 table
    flaeche_li_2    evaluated
    ____________    _________

     {'30*18'}         540   
     {'20*18'}         360   
     {'18*18'}         324   
     {'40*18'}         720   
     {'24*18'}         432   
     {'23*18'}         414   
     {'45*18'}         810   
     {'26*18'}         468   

[ga97cad]

Thank you for your quick response!! it worked out and helped me a lot!! best regards, lukas