How to delete certain strings with chaning numbers in a big data set

Hello community

I am new to matlab, watched already some tutorials to understand the basics I spent two days trying to do this and I'm literally pulling my hair out. Any help would be massively appreciated!

I have an array with more than 16k entries, which includes a lot of unnecessary informations and I wan to delete the some strings like "name", "Pat-ID" - that was not that difficult and I solved the problem quick and simple with: a = a(a~="name")

BUT I have massive problems to solve following example: I downloaded the data from a database and imported also the page numbers --> I want to delete the strings with a changing page number like this: "page X of 600" --> X=1-600

example of the data set: array with one column:

name XYZ

birthdate

ID

"Page 1 of 600"

...

i already tried something like this, but the syntax ist not correct:

for i=1:length(a)
    d=i;
   
    data_new5=data_new4(data_new4~="page %d of 600",);

end

I also tried to solve it with a for loop but unfortunately it didnt work.

I think that problem ist not that difficult but for a newcomer its just a little bit hard to get over it.

Thanks in advance.

stay safe.!!!

I

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

tmp = sprintf("page %d of 600",i);
data_new4~=tmp

Or

~strcmpi(data_new4,tmp)

Note that you will want to replace the previous data array on each loop iteration.

Or skip the loop by judicious usage of StartWith and EndsWith. Or use a regular expression, e.g.:

~cellfun(@isempty,regexp(data_new4,'^page \d+ of \d+$'))