How to write cell array into a csv file

Hello Everyone, I have a cell array C where the first row is string and the remaining rows contain numbers. How do I write the variable C into a CSV file?

For example,

c = {'abc' 'def'  'ghk';[23],[24],[67];[87],[13],[999];[656],[6767],[546]};

Thanks

Answer 1

[Cedric Wannaz]

To write the data in C to a CSV file. Use “writetable” in combination with the “cell2table” function.

% Convert cell to a table and use first row as variable names
T = cell2table(c(2:end,:),'VariableNames',c(1,:))
 
% Write the table to a CSV file
writetable(T,'myDataFile.csv')

For more information see:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/writetable.html

[Jon]

Or you could do the whole thing with fprintf

c = {'abc' 'def' 'ghk';[23],[24],[67];[87],[13],[999];[656],[6767],[546]}; 
  fid = fopen('junk.csv','w')
  fprintf(fid,'%s, %s, %s\n',c{1,:})
  fprintf(fid,'%f, %f, %f\n',c{2:end,:})
  fclose(fid)

[Cedric Wannaz]

Yes, you should propose this as a solution; I don't know why I was stuck thinking that the OP wanted a CSV/DLM-like function call somewhere, but your solution is certainly better.

[Jalaj Bidwai]

Thanks guys..for replying and giving the solution..Thankyou very much

[Image Analyst]

Sara Khalifa's flag moved here:

Great Solution. Thanks!

[Bidisha Das]

What if I want the csv file in append mode?

Answer 2

[Jon]

You could do it as follows with fprintf

c = {'abc' 'def' 'ghk';[23],[24],[67];[87],[13],[999];[656],[6767],[546]}; 
  fid = fopen('junk.csv','w')
  fprintf(fid,'%s, %s, %s\n',c{1,:})
  fprintf(fid,'%f, %f, %f\n',c{2:end,:})
  fclose(fid)

[Cedric Wannaz]

+1 ;-)

[Jalaj Bidwai]

The solution is legitimate to this particular problem.But what if I have many column instead of just 3(as is the case here).I just composed the problem to from a large chunk of data that I have...THe actual data has 30 columns.In the present solution I suppose that each %s in the first fprintf is for each of the heading string(i.e abc def ghk).

[Jon]

You could generalize it for an arbitrary number of columns as follows:

c = {'abc' 'def' 'ghk';[23],[24],[67];[87],[13],[999];[656],[6767],[546]}; 
  fid = fopen('junk.csv','w')
  numColumns = size(c,2);
  % use repmat to construct repeating formats
  % ( numColumns-1 because no comma on last one)
  headerFmt = repmat('%s,',1,numColumns-1);
  numFmt = repmat('%f,',1,numColumns-1);
  fprintf(fid,[headerFmt,'%s\n'],c{1,:})
  fprintf(fid,[numFmt,'%f\n'],c{2:end,:})
  fclose(fid)

Even better, if you have the statistics toolbox, you can use a dataset array and do the whole thing very cleanly as:

   ds = cell2dataset(c);
   export(ds,'file','junk2.csv','delimiter',',')

[Cedric Wannaz]

I don't know if the OP will read your comment, but thank you for the information; I didn't know EXPORT.

[Jalaj Bidwai]

Jonathan,Fanstastic. Both of the ways have worked for me..Thank you for the help..I really aprreciate it...

[Harsha Vardhana Padullaparti]

Jonathan, Perfect! Thanks so much for your input.

Answer 3

[Vibhav Gaur]

writecell(c, 'c.csv')

Answer 4

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

use csvwrite functionn

[Jon]

csvwrite only works on numeric arrays, not cell arrays with strings and numbers

[Youcef Yahiaoui]

Azzi,good to see your comments here. I usually use fprintf(fid...) for the first header lines then use csvwrite with the option -append...

Answer 5

[Zumbo_123]

Alternatively, you could use the method developed by Sylvain Fiedler. Below is the link to the file. It works with empty cells, numeric, char, string and logical cells. One array can contain all of them, but only one value per cell.

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/4400-cell-array-to-csv-file--cell2csv-m-

Answer 6

[Peter Farkas]

Convert to table and use writetable function T = cell2table(c(2:end, :)); T.Properties.VariableNames = c(1:end, :); writetable(T, res.csv);

Answer 7

[Aaron Thrasher]

I came to this page looking for an answer and found that all solutions were very slow for large arrays that include numeric and char based cell arrays of non-standard combinations. Instead, I created my own based off of previous comments and other research. I hope this helps someone as it has helped me reduce the time significantly.

function cellWrite(filename,origCell)
% save a new version of the cell for reference
modCell = origCell;
% assume some cells are numeric, in which case set to char
iNum = cellfun(@isnumeric,origCell);
%% Method 1 using indexing and straight conversion = 7 sec
tic
modCell(iNum) = cellstr(num2str([origCell{iNum}]'));
% toc
%% Method 2 using arrayfun = 25 sec
% tic
% modCell(iNum) = arrayfun(@num2str,[origCell{iNum}],'unif',0);
% toc

% tic
[rNum,cNum] = size(origCell);
frmt = repmat([repmat('%s,',1,cNum-1),'%s\n'],1,rNum);
fid = fopen(filename,'w');
fprintf(fid,frmt,modCell{:});
fclose(fid);
toc

end

[Aaron Thrasher]

Correction to the code - the cell needs to be transposed before writing because the data is written left to right vs. matlab reading cell top down.

[Michael Barrow]

Thanks for sharing your work!

Answer 8

[Yoram Segal]

convert the cell to a table and save the table as CSV

TT = array2table(C,'VariableNames',{'abc' 'def' 'ghk'});

writetable(TT,filename);

To read it back you can use TT = readtable(filename)

Answer 9

[TripleSSSS]

Matlab now support write from cell array to file

please check: writecell