How to get split to return a string array?

Hello,

I am trying to read a text file and split each line into space-delineated components. Using split I always get a cell array as output, and then have to use cell2mat to convert each cell to a string. According to matlab documentation, if the input field is a string array, the output will be a string array, but that is not how it is working for me. What am I doing wrong?

str = fgetl(filepointer);
substrings = split(str);

Isn't substrings a string array? If I say ischar(substring), the answer is 1. I have also tried fgets but the result is the same.

It is just clunky to have to call cell2mat before processing every chunk of the string.

thank you.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The low level file operations never return string objects.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/fgetl.html#d122e380317

tline = fgetl(fileID) returns the next line of the specified file, removing the newline characters.

• If the file is nonempty, then fgetl returns tline as a character vector.
• If the file is empty and contains only the end-of-file marker, then fgetl returns tline as a numeric value -1.

then have to use cell2mat to convert each cell to a string

No, that is not necessary.

You can proceed one of two ways:

substrings = string(split(str));

or

substrings = split(string(str));

I personally prefer the first of those two, but I can understand that some people might prefer the second of them.

[Katrina]

Thank you!