How to count number of letters (including some with special symbols)

Hi,

I have an Excel file from which I want to read the entire first column into Matlab and have as an output how many times given letters occur.

However, the problem is that some of the letters have an apostrophe attached to them, for example:

m'

s

a

s'

In the string above, s should be treated as a separate thing which has nothing in common with s'. So the frequency should show 1 for each of the letters, i.e.:

m' 1

s 1

a 1

s' 1

I have tried many things which I found of this forum but none of them has worked so far. One of the basic problems I encountered was loading in the file into Matlab due to the apostrophe, not to mention creating a proper table with frequency.

I would be very grateful for some help!

[Cris LaPierre]

Could you share some of the things you have tried? I don't want to waste time for either of us by suggesting something you've already tried.

[Edi D]

For instance, I followed the advice by Azzi which I found here: https://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/275847-how-to-count-the-number-of-each-character-from-a-text-file-and-the-frequency-of-it

in a modified version (no uppercase letters and I got rid of averaging and percentages).

I was also trying to adapt Andrei's advice from here https://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/69568-how-to-count-certain-characters-in-a-word but had no idea what to do with the apostrophe - even when I was doing copy-paste of my input using this code.

[Cris LaPierre]

What does your input data look like?

[Edi D]

It’s an Excel file (or .data if not converted) with the first column which I need to sort out with respect to frequency. A few first rows from the first column look like that: m' s a s' f1 k

So there is quite a mixture of alphanumeric and alpha-special-symbol things. Altogether there is 9 types of these (I listed 6 above), each single one occupying 1 row. The entire file has over 1000 rows in total so the above is just a fraction of the file contents.

Answer 1

[Cris LaPierre]

Ok, so if each entry is on its own row, then I'd do the following.

vals=readtable('ediD_count.xlsx','ReadVariableNames',false);
cnts=groupsummary(vals,"Var1")

I've attached what I'm using as a data set. It looks like this:

vals = 
    Var1
    ____

    'm''
    's' 
    'a' 
    's''
    'f1'
    'k' 
    's' 
    'a' 
    's''
    'a' 
...

The result is a table of unique values found in the first variable, and the number of times it was found in the second.

cnts = 
    Var1    GroupCount
    ____    __________

    'a'         4     
    'f1'        2     
    'k'         2     
    'm''        1     
    's'         3     
    's''        4     

[Edi D]

Thank you very much for your help!!! It works great