Please let me know a way to use for loop to extract the first row elements from each column of data and check a condition and store these in a matrix

Consider a cell of strings containing gender and height information of some patients (but the data is a little bit messy). Gender is given as 'f','female','m' or 'male' and heights are given in feet or centimeter (some data point are missing). For example

{'f' 'm' 'f' 'female' 'male';

'5.9' '6' '172' '' '180' };

Write a function m=heightconvert(data) to convert the cell array data to a matrix of double m. Use 0 to represent female, 1 to represent male. And convert height into meters and represent any missing data points as NaN. Assume that any height value that is less than 10 is in feet and you need the convert those values to meters using 1 foot = 0.3048 meter. Use str2double() function to convert a string to a number.

Answer 1

[DGM]

Something like this

C = {'f'      'm'    'f'      'female'    'male';
    '5.9'    '6'    '172'    ''          '180' };

g = double(cellfun(@(x) x(1)=='m',C(1,:)));
h = cellfun(@str2double,C(2,:));
mask = h>=10;
h(mask) = h(mask)/100;
h(~mask) = h(~mask)*0.3048;

% show results
g

g = 1×5

0 1 0 0 1

h

h = 1×5

1.7983 1.8288 1.7200 NaN 1.8000

You'll still have to wrap this up as a function.