String Delimiting and Array Storage

Hi, could someone tell me the best way to delimit a long single row array of characters based on a reoccurring character in the array? In this case I am using "/" to separate strings.

The biggest challenge I am having is storing delimited strings into an array because the string length is not constant.

I can have something like abc/adeht/ahdiglkjsad/asd/ds but I cannot create the following array

[adeht

ahdiglkjsad

asd

ds ]

because the strings are all different lengths and the dimensions do not match.

Can anyone recommend a solution? I need to be able to reference and analyze each string on a per character basis after delimiting. That's why I chose to try to do an array originally, however, this is not working out.

Thanks, Nikolay

Answer 1

[Jan]

You can use a cell string:

str = 'abc/adeht/ahdiglkjsad/asd/ds';
cstr = regexp(str, '/', 'split');

[Matt Fig]

To get the results in to one array, as you show in your question:

char(cstr)

But if you are analyzing each sub-string separately, a cell array is fine and perhaps preferred for storage.

[Jan]

After char(cstr) you get a CHAR matrix padded with spaces. There is no way to avoid the padding, because a matrix must be rectangular amd all rows must have the same number of elements.

[Matt Fig]

Yes, I should not have left that out.

[Nikolay Rodionov]

Thanks, this works great but in using the char() function I am encountering the same difficulty with padding as I was before. Is there anyway to get the length of a string in, lets say, array = char(cstr), array(1,:) that is not padding? If I use a simple length function, then it tells me that the row length is 11 characters, even though there are only 3 letters .

Thanks again!

[Matt Fig]

Why not just work with cstr instead??

length(cstr{1})  % Find the length of the first string
cellfun('length',cstr) % Or all lengths at once.

[Nikolay Rodionov]

I was wondering because I am simply more familiar with arrays. I'll try working with cells though. Is there a way for me to reference portions of a cell's contents, such as characters 1:3?

This is all part of a nucleotide sequence analysis script, I need to be able to parse the delimited sequences and store them into external cells or arrays.

[Matt Fig]

C = {'asdlfdjsadf','awwretjrdf'}; 
C{2}(4:5)

[Nikolay Rodionov]

Thank you so much!