cell containing strings outputs only dots

hi there,

i have a small issue concerning the conversion from a cell containing strings to numbers. I am aware of str2double, but I would like to speed the process up. I tried what was suggested in another thread of this forum, however, this results in the following problem:

My cell data{1} looks like this (in fact, it's way longer than that):

data{1}(1:5)

ans =

    '11493520'
    '11493521'
    '11493522'
    '11493523'
    '11493524'

So I can convert the contents of the cell to numbers using these lines of code:

 C = data{1};
 S = sprintf('%s*', C{:});
 samples(:,icell) = sscanf(S, '%f*')';

This works fine. However, when I try to access the second cell, MATLAB fails to read out the content properly. data{2} has the following content:

ans =

    '448.2'
    '448.0'
    '448.0'
    '448.6'
    '449.2'

If I try to access the cell with data{2}(1:5) i get 5 rows with dots as an output:

data{2}(1:5)

ans =

    '.'
    '.'
    '.'
    '.'
    '.'

Could someone please tell me what is going wrong here? Thanks a lot!

Cheers, Tom

Answer 1

[Suryaansh Mata]

The command 'sprintf' just changes the display formatting of the strings. Rather use str2double and str2num inside 2 loops. Run one loop for the number of cells in the data and the other for each string array that is contained in each cell of data. That should be a nice workaround for this