Export to a fixed width text file

Hi. I have a fairly simple problem, but haven't figured out how to solve it.

I would like to convert a cell array to a text file with fixed width columns. For example, the first row might contain a mixture of strings and numbers:

's09' 1111222003 321 'P' 'ehz'

and I want to have five spaces between the first and second columns, seven spaces between the second and third, and 3 spaces between the third and fourth. The reason for this is because I am converting the data into a very finicky format.

Thanks for any help in advance.

Answer 1

[Jonathan Sullivan]

Use sprintf / fprintf

Here is an example of making everything 16 characters wide:

A={'s09' 1111222003 321 'P' 'ehz';'z09' 1011222003 321 'O' 'edz'};
A=cellfun(@num2str,A,'Un',false)
for ii = 1:size(A,1);
B{ii} = sprintf([repmat('%16s',1,size(A,2)) '\n'],A{ii,:});
end
B = cat(2,B{:})

The number (16) between the % and the s determines the width that it will print out the entry. For more information type

help sprintf
doc sprintf

or

help fprintf
doc fprintf

[Jesse Hutchinson]

Thanks a bunch. I ended up choosing to keep the string and number data separate and used fprintf to generate my text file. This is the final bit of code:

[nrows,ncols] = size(pickcat);

filename = 'test.arrival';
fid = fopen(filename,'w');

    for row=1:nrows
        fprintf(fid,'%-6s %17.5f %8d %8d %8d %8d %-8s %-8s %-1s %6.3f %7.2f %7.2f %7.2f %7.2f %7.2f %7.3f %10.1f %7.2f %7.2f %-1s %-2s %10.5g %-1s %-15s %8d %17.5f\n',pickcat{row,:});
    end

    fclose(fid);

As you can see, I had quite a complex data set! Thanks so much for the help.

Answer 2

[Iman Ansari]

A={'s09' 1111222003 321 'P' 'ehz';'z09' 1011222003 321 'O' 'edz'};
A=cellfun(@num2str,A,'Un',false)
B=strcat(A(:,1),{'     '},A(:,2),{'       '},A(:,3),{'   '},A(:,4),A(:,5))

[Jesse Hutchinson]

That seems to work great. Unfortunately, the character length on the values in some of my columns vary.

I am trying to think of a way to have a set column width (say, eight spaces for the first column) even though the value written within the first column may vary between 3 and 5 characters, while the rest need to be blank.

[Iman Ansari]

A={'s09' 1111222003 321 'P' 'ehz';'ere09' 11222003 31 'O' 'dz'};
for i=1:2
    B(i,:)=sprintf('%-5s   %-12d     %-3d   %-s %-3s',A{i,1},A{i,2},A{i,3},A{i,4},A{i,5})
end