Reading in data from irregular xls/text file

I have data in an xls file, in which cells have the following structure "[0.35,0.57,0.77,0.98];[];[0.42,0.73,0.93,1.12];[];[0.37,0.62,0.82];[0.43,0.67,0.87,1.07];"

this is just one example of one xls-cell, and each cell will look slightly different, i.e. different number of values within brackets, some empty brackets etc . When reading this in using xlsread, this is turned into a cell/char.

So I need to turn this into a num in which this order is preserved, but am uncertain how to do this efficiently. That is, in the example above I'd need something like x =

    [1x4 double]
    []
    [1x4 double]
    []
    [1x3 double]
    [1x4 double]
    [1x4 double]
    [1x4 double]
    [1x3 double]
    [1x2 double]
    []
    [1x2 double]
    [1x2 double]

Any suggestions are much appreciated

[per isakson]

Is x as a cell array of double good enough?

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

a={[0.35,0.57,0.77,0.98];[];[0.42,0.73,0.93,1.12];[];[0.37,0.62,0.82];[0.43,0.67,0.87,1.07]}
cell2mat(a')