Split a string into 4 character groups?

Hello,

I am writing a program as part of my foundation degree which takes messages and encrypts them in a basic way. So far I have used a .txt file encoded in the ASCII format and maniuplated each character to output a single line string based upon the length of the original message:

n=1:length(number_message)

the variable 'number_message' is the output variable in my code. As this string could potentially be any length (n), how can I reliably split this output string into groups of characters for further processing?

My program design is to use multiple layers and I want to group at this stage to deal with the data in groups before moving on to a potential HEX conversion.

I am quite new to Matlab, and coding in general so this may seem like a bit of a strange question and may not make sense.

Kind Regards

_message)

Answer 1

[per isakson]

"Split a string into 4 character groups?", "split this output string into groups of characters" and "I want to group at this stage to deal with the data in groups"

%%  cssm.txt contains the text of your question 
chr = fileread( 'cssm.txt' );   
%%  replace line breaks with spaces
chr = strrep( chr, char(13), '' );
chr = strrep( chr, newline, char(32) );
%%
group_len = 4;
len = numel( chr );
d   = rem( len, group_len );
chr = horzcat( chr, repmat( char(32), 1, group_len-d ) );
chr = reshape( chr, 4,[] ); 
chr(:,1:12)     % the groups are column wise

ans = 4×12 char array
    'Ho wiaom t f'
    'e,arn g p mo'
    'l migpraaoyu'
    'lI t rasrf n'

%%  easier to read, but somewhat less efficient  
chr = permute( chr, [2,1] );
chr(1:12,:)     % the groups are row wise

ans = 12×4 char array
    'Hell'
    'o, I'
    ' am '
    'writ'
    'ing '
    'a pr'
    'ogra'
    'm as'
    ' par'
    't of'
    ' my '
    'foun'

Answer 2

[darren Clipson]

I think I have found an alternate path to progress moving the data over to binary using the dec2bin command I can create an array of binary characters arranged in a 172x7 array.

To achive this I used:

number_message2 = dec2bin(number_message)

number_message3 = bin2dec(number_message2)

This code switches between the 2 message formats and I think I can further manipulate the data from its binary form. I'm certain I will need to ask further questions to achieve this but i'm not entirely sure what my plans are going to be at this stage.

Feel free to add any input if you feel it nessessary.

Regards