Transformation form char to double

Hi everyone .. I know this should be a simple one, but somehow I'm doing hard on this task ...

I got: A row of chars representing numbers, which for example look like this '1799', '1,867', '0,219', '-0,719502', etc. and are saved in cells (200x1 cell).

So what I want to do: is converting those chars into the equivalent numbers they're representing!

My idea:

1. was - due them being in a cell - using cell2mat ... which isn't working because Matlab says "Dimensions of arrays being concatenated are not consistent.".
2. So my next thought I had was simply using str2double ... here the problem is that all the commas are deleted and for example instead of '0,219' I end up with the number 219. Not what I need.
3. Elsewise I had the idea of using strsplit after using char on my row. Unfortunately here Matlab says my "'STRING' input must be either a char row vector, a cell array of char row vectors, or a string array."
4. So my latest approach is using:

str2double(char(myrow(:,1)'));

... which results in 'NaN' as my answer. What am I doing wrong?

I appreciate your thoughts! Best regards.

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

You need both strrep and str2double:

>> C = {'1799', '1,867', '0,219', '-0,719502'};
>> str2double(strrep(C,',','.'))
ans =
   1799.00000      1.86700      0.21900     -0.71950

Native MATLAB only uses decimal point as the decimal radix character, never a comma, so you will always have to convert this explicitly.

[jrbbrt]

Thanks for your quick respond and explanation Stephen!