Problem using cell2mat on cell arrays from textscan

I'm using textscan to import two columns of numbers from a csv file. The resulting array 'data' comes out as a cell array. I would prefer for the arrays to be numerical vectors instead, so I tried to use cell2mat on each of the data cell arrays, 'data{2}' and 'data{2}'.

    fid = fopen(filename);
    data = textscan(fid,'%s %s','Delimiter',',');
    fclose(fid);
    startTimes = cell2mat(data{1});
    endTimes = cell2mat(data{2});

I end up with the error as shown below. I'm not sure what is causing this issue as the problem seems to be a dimension mismatch within the cell2mat function code.

Error using cat Dimensions of matrices being concatenated are not consistent.

Error in cell2mat (line 84) m{n} = cat(1,c{:,n});

Error in respSpace_LoL_Analysis_v1 (line 19) startTimes = cell2mat(data{1});

Answer 1

[Jiro Doke]

If they are numbers, why don't you read them in as a numeric (e.g. %f)?

data = textscan(fid,'%f %f','Delimiter',',');

Then, you can just extract out the cell components.

startTimes = data{1};
endTimes = data{2};

[Jiro Doke]

The reason your code is failing is because the data was brought in as a character array, and the numbers had different number of digits. When you tried to cell2mat, it was trying to vertically concatenate the character arrays, which resulted in a dimension mismatch error.