cell2mat for column of strings

Hello,

I am having trouble converting a cell with numbers in string format to a column vector. The cell is as follows

data={'10';'1';'40';'5'}

I would like to convert this to a vector

new_data=[10;1;40;5]

When I try to use cell2mat(cell), this returns an error: Dimensions of matrices being concatenated are not consistent.

The only work around I have found thus far is the following

for ii=1:length(data)
    new_data(ii,1)=(str2num(data{ii}));
end

Where new_cell is the desired vector. This would not be a problem to use, but the real cells contain many hundreds of numbers in string format, and the loop is eating too much time.

Is there any other workaround for this?

Thanks, Carmelo

[Stephen23]

Do not use str2num: use faster and more robust str2double instead.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/52243-why-str2double-is-preferred-over-str2num

Answer 1

[KSSV]

data={'10';'1';'40';'5'} ;
iwant = cellfun(@str2num,data);

The above cellfun uses loop inside. You may check with this also:

str2double(data)

[Walter Roberson]

str2double(data) should do a fine job in one step, and is more robust. For example if the user entered 'delete(''*.*'')' then str2num() would proceed to delete all of your files but str2double would detect that the string is not numeric.

[Carmelo Gonzales]

Thanks for the quick help!