Splitting a cell array of multi-word strings into a cell array of single-word strings

I have a cell array of multi-word strings that is very long (many tens of thousands of cells) that I want to split into a cell array of single-word strings. Is there a way to do this without combining the split function and a for loop?

Currently, I am doing the following:

CellStrings = {'Here is my First String';'Now a second string';'And here is a third'}

SingleColumnStrings = {};

for i = 1:length(CellStrings)

temp = split(CellStrings(i));

SingleColumnStrings = [SingleColumnStrings; temp];

clear temp

end

clear i

When CellStrings gets large, this for loop takes forever. Is there a way to do this as a matrix/vector operation?

Thanks in advance.

[Guillaume]

Note that clear is rarely needed. clear inside a loop is a particularly bad idea and will slow the loop for no useful purpose.

Answer 1

[fred ssemwogerere]

I think this can do nicely:

SingleColumnStrings=cellstr(strsplit(strjoin(string({'Here is my First String';'Now a second string';'And here is a third'})'))')

[Illan Kramer]

That's perfect! My tic/toc runtime now for that operation has gone from over 50s to about 0.25s. Thanks so much! I actually just put the transpose on the outside of the entire right side of the equal sign instead of having 2 of them in there and it worked just as well.

Answer 2

[Guillaume]

Possiblty more efficient than the accepted answer since it doesn't require concatenating strings to then split them again:

SingleColumnStrings = regexp(CellStrings, '\S+', 'match');
SingleColumnStrings =[SingleColumnStrings{:}].';

[Stephen23]

+1 definitely the way to go.

[Illan Kramer]

This is also a great solution, thanks! Comparing tic/toc runtimes, this one is 0.01s faster than the accepted answer. I will luxuriate in all of my new spare time upon deploying this solution going forward.