Why writetable() adds ' 'true ' table element as ''table?

Here is how my MATLAB table transitionsTable looks like:

I added a single quote before true and false so that Excel won't interpret them as special words.

But when I do:

writetable(transitionsTable,excel_file,'Sheet',1,'Range','C1')

'true and 'false show up in Excel cells like this:

It looks fine, but those single quotes aren't suppose to show. When I double-click on one of them, it becomes:

[Walter Roberson]

Excel has strange display rules for text. These days I just assume that excel might be lying about the actual content of text cells.

Answer 1

[Jeremy Hughes]

I think this is a case where using strings would make things more clear.

In MATLAB, if I create a char vector and put a single-quote in it, that looks like

c = '...''...'

If I do this with a string, I can avoid the escaping.

s = "...'..."

It may be the case that the char vectors in your data have two single-quotes, which display as one in MATLAB.

try

string(transitionsTable.transition) to see if that's what's happening