Converting multiple cells to an equivilent character vector defining the original array

As part of an app, I need to use a cell array containing characters to generate a string of text that when pasted in the command window would generate the original cell array as a variable.

input example: the 1×4 cell array named 'legText' with the below contents.

{'Indexed'} {'Forsterite'} {'Enstatite'} {'Diopside'}

Desired output (as a character vector)

legText={'Indexed','Forsterite','Enstatite','Diopside'};

I've been doing this by appending to a character vector in a loop without preallocation, but this is pretty inefficient. Is there a better method?

Thanks, Jessica.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

fprintf('legText = cellstr(%s);\n', mat2str(string(legText)))

or

fprintf('legText = {'); fprintf('''%s'',', legText{:}); fprintf('};\n');

[Jessica Hiscocks]

Thank you, this got me 95% of the way there! It turned out that using the second option, changing to sprintf, and concatenating was the answer- the final comma does not affect the output

code:

temp=[sprintf('legText = {'), sprintf('''%s'',', legText{:}), sprintf('};')];

output:

legText = {'Indexed','Forsterite','Enstatite','Diopside',};