Number of elements in cell array

Consider following code and I want find total number of elements in a. I want the answer to be 17.

a = {2};
a(2) = {magic(4)};

[Mathieu NOE]

yes

total number of a array is 17

a{:}

ans =

     2


ans =

    16     2     3    13
     5    11    10     8
     9     7     6    12
     4    14    15     1

Answer 1

[Balazs Fischer]

sum(cellfun('prodofsize',a))

it gets more complicated when a contains other cell arrays.

[Ishan Gawai]

Thank you very much :)