Assign to certain positions of an entire cell array values from another cell array of the same size

Dear community,

sorry if this question was answered somewhere but I could not find a solution to exactly this problem and I have not found functions in Matlab that do what I need.

I have a quite simple problem assigning to an entire cell array values from another cell array of the same size. However I want to assign them to a certain and same positions of the cells. I know I can do the for-loop but I want to avoid it.

Example:

I have a cell array

a_part{1} = [1; 2; 8];

a_part{2}=[11; 31; 15];

a_part{3} =[2; 4; 8];

and I would like to assign it to another cell array which is of the same size (1x3) but can be empty for example

a_whole = cell(1,3).

However I want to assign these values to certain (same) positions in an entire a_whole, say to rows [1, 3, 5]. I want to get

a_whole{1} = [1;0;2;0;8];

a_whole{2} = [11;0;31;0;15];

a_whole{3} = [2;0;4;0;8]};

I tried the following:

a_whole{:}([1,3,5],:) = a_part;

a_whole(:)([1,3,5],:) = a_part;

[a_whole{:}([1,3,5],:)] = deal(a_part);

I get different error messages but no result. However, this works nicely:

for i=1:3

a_whole{i}([1,3,5],:) = a_part{i};

end

I hope there is a better solution.

Thanks for help and your time!

Answer 1

[Andrei Bobrov]

a_part {1} = [1; 2; 8];
a_part {2} = [11; 31; 15];
a_part {3} = [2; 4; 8];

a = zeros(numel(a_part{1})+2,numel(a_part));
a(1:2:end,:) = [a_part{:}];
a_whole = num2cell(a,1);

[Valeria]

Yes! Great, it works!

Thank you very much for the help!

Answer 2

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

a_part{1} = [1; 2; 8];
a_part{2}=[11; 31; 15];
a_part{3} =[2; 4; 8]
a_whole = cell(1,3)
out=cellfun(@(x)  [x(1) 0 x(2) 0 x(3)],a_part,'un',0)

[Valeria]

Sorry, I was probably not too clear. It does not really do the job in a very general setting. My example was simplified but I want to have a general code where I do not want to specify that there are zeros in between. Later I want to fill these zeros but other values from another cell array. What should I do then?

Thanks for trial though :)

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

Then provide a correct example, your question is still not clear!

[Valeria]

OK, I just wanted to be free to fill in values to certain predifined positions whatever cell array I had from before. I chose for simplicity to have an empty cell array but I could have had any cell array and wanted my code to work. I did not want to fill zeros in between.

Thanks a lot for trial, I've got already code working.