How do I count and save twitter hashtags?

I am writing a script that analyzes the hashtags from tweets that I saved in a text file. So far I managed to count the amount of hashtags in the file:

    fid = fopen('Tweets.txt');
numberOfTweets = 0;
while i ~= -1
    i = fgetl(fid);
    numberOfTweets = numberOfTweets + 1;
end
numberOfTweets = numberOfTweets - 1;
frewind(fid)
for i = 1:numberOfTweets
   twitterStuff{i} = fgetl(fid);
end
numberOfHash = 0;
for i = 1:numberOfTweets
    if(strfind(twitterStuff{i}, '#')  ~=0);
        c = strfind(twitterStuff{i}, '#');
         [rowHash columnHash] = size(c);
        numberOfHash = numberOfHash + columnHash;
    end
end

Now, I want to find out what the specific hashtags are and save them into a cell array, but I don't really know how to do that.

[Walter Roberson]

Is # by itself a hashtag? Is #this#that with no spaces two hashtags? Is #35 a valid hashtag? Is #? a valid hashtag?

[Abim]

When I said counting the amount of hashtags, I just counted the amount of # .But when I say, save the hashtags, I want to save the words contained within the hashtags. technically, #this#that would be two hashtags, but for now I would just want to focus on the basic #this hashtag.

Answer 1

[Jonathan Epperl]

You should use regular expressions for that, you can do pretty much anything with them. This should do what you want to, and if not, then it should point you in the right direction:

s = '#Matlab#2012b rocks my #sox # off!'
% Match a '#' with zero or more characters that aren't whitespace or '#' after it
T = regexp(s,'(#[^ #]*)','tokens')
T{:}
% Match a '#' with 1 or more characters that aren't whitespace or '#' after it
T = regexp(s,'(#[^ #]+)','tokens')
T{:}
% Match a '#' with 1 or more characters that aren't whitespace or '#' after 
% it, but don't capture the '#'
T = regexp(s,'#([^ #]+)','tokens')
T{:}

Answer 2

[Sean de Wolski]

Using regular expressions:

str = '#MATLAB is an awesome product by #MathWorks';

[matchstart,matchend,~,hashtag] = regexp(str,'(\#(\w*))')

Answer 3

[Abim]

Thanks