How to remove first charachter from a string inside a cell

Hi everyone,

I have a 6 x 5 cell array (see example file). I would like, for the 3th and 4th column to remove the first character (the symbol $), so I can do some operations with the data. I know how to do remove this in a single string, but when I am working with the column, it doesn't work. For instance if I put:

a = data_SVO{6,3};
c = c = a(2:end);
c = 
6.3

Then c is the value without the '$'. I know probably is really simple, but I haven't managed to find a solution to this. I would appreciate if you could guide me to solve this issue.

Many thanks

Answer 1

[per isakson]

One way with R2016a

>> load 20_SVO.MAT
>> data_SVO(:,3:4) = regexprep( data_SVO(:,3:4), '\$', '' );
>> data_SVO
data_SVO = 
    [6]    [9]    '8.5'    '8.5'    [ 5.9365]
    [3]    [9]    '8.5'    '8.5'    [ 3.9902]
    [5]    [5]    '7.5'    '7.5'    [14.4665]
    [1]    [1]    '8.5'    '8.5'    [ 6.0439]
    [2]    [9]    '10'     '5'      [20.5387]
    [4]    [4]    '6.3'    '6.8'    [15.7036]
>>

or use a double loop.

Variants

• Replace '\$' by '^\$' to be sure to only remove "$" when it's in the first position.
• Replace '\$' by '^.' to remove the first character whatever it is.

[Ramiro Rea]

Thanks, this solves the issue. By any chance do you know how to transform this columns to numbers? cell2mat doesn't work. If I transpose the column to use cell2mat,it does this:

d = data_SVO(:,3);
c = cell2mat(d.');
c =
8.58.57.58.5106.3

I know is not related to the original question, but maybe you have a solution for this. Thanks again.