CELL2MAT does not support cell arrays containing cell arrays or objects

I am writing a function and it worked fine until I made a tweak it a pit then I got the above error

path1 = '/Users/punk/Documents/Data/PO3/';
path2 = '*.HWR';
direc =  struct2table(dir([fullfile(path1,path2)]));
direc = sortrows(direc,'date');
table2struct(direc);
filenames = {direc.name};

for trialnumber = 1:length(filenames);
filename = filenames{trialnumber};

data = dlmread(fullfile(path1, num2str(cell2mat(filenames(trialnumber)))),'',1,0);

But I am getting this error

Error using cell2mat

CELL2MAT does not support cell arrays containing cell arrays or objects.

Error in Complete (line 38)

data = readtable(fullfile(path1, num2str(cell2mat(filenames(trialnumber)))),'',1,0);

[Walter Roberson]

trialnumber is not defined at that point.

filenames is not defined at that point.

table2struct(direc);

You are not assigning the result of that to a variable.

[Reuben Addison]

The are all defined in my function, I will update that in my code above

[Walter Roberson]

You have mixed up the syntax of readtable() and dlmread() . When you use readtable(), unless the second parameter is an options object such as SpreadsheetImportOptions object, then everything after the first parameter must be name-value pairs. That might include 'NumHeaderLines' option -- but more likely considering you are using dlmread() is that your first row is headers, and you probably do not want to skip those when you readtable() as the header supplies the variable names.

Also, your filename is already a character vector; why are you using num2str() with it?

Answer 1

[Jan]

table2struct(direc);

This line converts the table direc to a struct, but ignores the result. In consequence this line has no effect.

Simplify your code by avoiding the useless conversion to table and back again:

path1 = '/Users/punk/Documents/Data/PO3/';
path2 = '*.HWR';
direc = dir(fullfile(path1, path2)));  % No need for a concatenation with []
[~, idx] = sort([direc.datenum]);
direc = direc(index);

But what is "filenames" and "trialnumber"? Maybe you mean:

data = dlmread(fullfile(path1, direc(trialnumber).name), '', 1, 0);