Convert Cell array with numeric and non-numeric data into a numeric array.

I have a cell array of data pulled from field measurements. This data should be numeric, but it sporadically has non numeric (e.g. "I/O Timeout") text strings in it. I'm loading this into MATLAB via xlsread. I'd like to convert this into a numeric array, and have all of the non-numeric values be converted to "NaN". It seems that this should be a pretty basic thing to do, but I have not found a way to do it yet. Cell2Mat wants every element to be of the same data type.

Thanks for any help.

-Mike A.

Answer 1

[Fangjun Jiang]

a={1,2,'timeout',3,4,'i/o'}
b=cellfun(@ischar,a)
a(b)={nan}
c=cell2mat(a)