editing a cell in a loop

If I have a 1 column cell

x=

'dog'

'at'

'cat'

'four'

'creative'

How do I write code that removes the words based on their length of letters. Like say I input n=1 it removes all words with letter 1 then n=2 it would remove all words with letter 2 so it would remove 'at' then n=3 removes all words with letter 3 so removes 'cat' and 'dog' leaving

x=

'four'

'creative'

Thanks

Answer 1

[Geoff Hayes]

Max - use cellfun to apply a function to each element in your array. In your case, you could use the length function to determine the lengths of each string or to determine which strings are a certain number of characters long. For example, using your x from above

 n    = 2;
 idcs = cellfun(@length(str)==2,x);

will return

 idcs =

     0
     1
     0
     0
     0

which tells us that the second string in x is of length two. We can then remove that string easily enough by doing

 x(idcs) = [];

The above call to cellfun takes an anonymous function as its first input parameter

 @(str)length(str)==2

where str is a string element from our cell array x. We calculate the length of str and compare it to two, so that the output from this call is logical (true or false).