Converting cellarray to double

I have a cellarray of size 100000 x 20 and need to convert to numeric array. I used function

str2double(StringData);

but it's taking lot of time to convert. i have the same issue when converting numeric to string using arrayfun:

arrayfun(@(x) num2str(x,4),Data,'Uni',0);

Is there a better way to improve the performance?

[Image Analyst]

Read the FAQ then tell us what kind of data type is inside each cell of your cell array. For example do the cells contain integers, strings, structures, numerical arrays, other cells, tables, classes, or something else?

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

Here are a few ways that you could try to improve performance:

• Avoid converting to string. This conversion is always going to be a slow process, and the only time that you really need to convert large amounts of data to/from string is when reading/writing text files (in which case you should be using file-handling functions anyway). So if your code converts massive arrays to string, then it probably could do with a major revision.
• Avoid repeating the conversion. Review your code: Could this conversion be performed once, and then the string values used again?
• Use low-level functions. Have a look at str2double: you will see that it is basically just a wrapper for sscanf . And num2str is a wrapper for sprintf . So one could save a few precious milliseconds by using the low-level functions directly. Keep in mind that if you do this you will need to manage the array sizes and classes very precisely.
• Do not store each string value separately, rather keep multiple values in one char array or string. Many string-parsing functions will operate on the whole array: e.g. sscanf will repeat parsing with the given format until a non-matching value. Some file-reading functions accept strings as their input, and can parse it in one go, e.g. textscan .
• Cheat. If you are dealing with integers between zero and nine inclusive, then you can do a very direct and fast conversion string-'0', e.g. '9'-'0' -> 9.
• Consider vectorization. Yes vectorization even helps with converting to string. For example:

sscanf(sprintf('%s\v',CellOfStrings{:}),'%f\v')

is much faster than

cellfun(@(s)sscanf(s,'%f'),CellOfStrings)

although it only works for data of class double.