Storing Strings in Cell Arrays:

The one good application of a cell array is to store strings of various lengths. As cell arrays can store various types of values in the elements, that means that the strings of various lengths can be stored in the elements.

>> names = {'Sue', 'Cathy', 'Xavier'}

names =

  'Sue'   'Cathy'   'Xavier'

This is very useful, as unlike vectors of strings generated using char or strvcat, such strings do not have extra trailing blanks.

The length of each string can be exhibited using a for loop to loop through the elements of the cell array:

>> for i = 1:length(names)

disp(length(names{i}))

  end

3

5

6

It is possible to convert a cell array of strings to a character array, and vice versa. The MATLAB has numerous functions which facilitate this. For illustration, the function cellstr converts from a character array padded with blanks to the cell array in which the trailing blanks have been eliminated.

>> greetmat = char('Hello','Goodbye');

>> cellgreets = cellstr(greetmat)

cellgreets =

'Hello'

'Goodbye'

The char function can convert a cell array to the character matrix:

>> names = {'Sue', 'Cathy', 'Xavier'};

>> cnames = char(names)

cnames =

Sue

Cathy

Xavier

>> size(cnames)

ans =

  3    6