find the matching strings in tables

Hi,

I have an excel file and I converted to a table. My table has a column called "Locations". The location column contains a long list of string like " Country1-Area1,CityA-52". I would like to rename the sites as follows: Area1,CityA-52. I tried many things to find the first "-" index number in a table. I thought if I find the first index number then I could read the rest of the string. Could not succeed so far. Since it is a table it is more complicated. Any ideas?

Thank you Birsen

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

YourTable.Locations = regexprep( YourTable.Locations, '^[^-]+-', '', 'lineanchors');

[Birsen]

Walter, Thank you for the answer. You are right I had to give a demo. Unfortunately your suggestion did not work. It did not give an error but did not change the result neither.

Here it is what I have;

filename='BkgData.xls'
YourTable = readtable(filename);

Here it is how my table looks like

Country         Locations           ........

=======              ========       ==========

'Argentina'    'Argentina-Area1,CityA-52'

'Belgium'      'Belgium-Area5, 346_6

.................

 I used your code

YourTable.Locations = regexprep( YourTable.Locations, '^[^-]+-', '', 'lineanchors');

The 'Argentina-Area1,CityA-52' still stands there as a one piece.

Thanks again

[Birsen]

Walter,

I was wrong. I made a mistake when i tried for the first time. Your code solved the problem. Thanks again.

Birsen

Answer 2

[George]

You can use regexp.

a = 'Country1-Area1,CityA-52';
expression = '-.+$'; % a dash, one or more characters until the end of the line
[token, ~] = regexp(a, expression, 'match');
token{1}(2:end) % lop off the dashes

ans =
1×11 char array
Area1,CityA-52

[Birsen]

George, Thank you. Your code works great when the string is a single line, but I have a table. Actually 'a" here is a Table not a single line string. In the table there are thousands of line like "a". I can go around and use your code but there got to be a easier way to split the stings and rearrange columns in Table. Thanks Again

Birsen

Answer 3

[Image Analyst]

What about using the strrep() function? If you'd given code for making a demo table, I might have tried it for you. You gotta make it easy for us, or at least that helps.

[Birsen]

Image Analyst;

I can see I did not provide enough information. Thank you though. strrep() function is to find and replace the matching strings. If I had only a couple of line that would help but here I am trying to split hundreds of them and each time the string (country name) is different. And they are located in a Table column.

Birsen