How to ignore letters in a numeric cell?

I have imported a vector into MatLab from excel which was originally imported from ANSYS. I would like to plot this vector against another one, however each entry has a 'mm' after it, like so:

PinRadius = [0.01mm;0.02mm;0.03mm;0.04mm;...]

Is there a way in MatLab to ignore the letters and just read the numbers so I can produce a plot? I know I could manually do this but I have over 200+ entries.

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks!

[Adam]

Are they in cell arrays or a char array (implying that every one is the same length and never more nor fewer digits)?

The example format you have given is not valid as it is a numeric array with characters in it too.

[Daniel Tanner]

It is in a cell array. They go from 0.01mm to 2.9mm.

Answer 1

[Adam]

cellfun( @(x) str2double( erase( x, 'mm' ) ), pin_radius )

should convert them to an array of doubles.

If you are using pre R2016b you would have to use something like this instead:

cellfun( @(x) str2double( strrep( x, 'mm', '' ) ), pin_radius )

(Note in that version the 3rd argument to strrep is two consecutive single quotes, not a double quote)

[Daniel Tanner]

Perfect, thank you!

Answer 2

[Stephen Cobeldick]

Simpler and much more efficient with sscanf:

>> C = {'0.01mm';'0.02mm';'0.03mm';'0.04mm'};
>> V = sscanf([C{:}],'%fmm')
V =
   0.010000
   0.020000
   0.030000
   0.040000

[Daniel Tanner]

Thank you!