plotting figure ignore blank entries

hello

i have a cell array with 5000+ rows and 1 column

i was to plot a figure but my problem is that there are many blank entries. i want the figure to consider plots from the previous entry that has a number to the next one (i.e. i will be doing a stacked time series so i dont want these empty cells to be completely ignored)

[David Hill]

Provide a simple example of your data and the type of figure you want.

[Adam Danz]

I'm guessing your data has NaN values. You need to remove or fill in the NaN values.

[Emily Platt]

TapsX=
'321'
''
''
''
''
''
''
''
'264'
''
''
''
''
''
''
''
'301'
...

so between every value there are 7 empty cells

I want to use the plot function to make a simple one line figure

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

Convert the cell array of character vectors or the string array to a numeric vector, then remove NaN values.

% Or string array: TapsX = ["123" "" "" "" "200" "" "" "321" "" ""];
TapsX = {'123' '' '' '' '200' '' '' '321' '' ''};
TapsXnum = str2double(TapsX)

TapsXnum = 1×10

123 NaN NaN NaN 200 NaN NaN 321 NaN NaN

TapsXnum(isnan(TapsXnum)) = []

TapsXnum = 1×3

123 200 321

Since you have TapsX I assume you have TapsY with the same problem. In that case you'll need to remove the elements pair-wise to maintain the paired coordinates.

TapsX = ["123" "94"  ""   "" "200" "" "88" "321"  ""  "2"];
TapsY = [  ""  "94" "135" "" "200" "" "88"   "" "112" "2"];
TapsXnum = str2double(TapsX);
TapsYnum = str2double(TapsY);
nanIdx = isnan(TapsXnum) | isnan(TapsYnum); 
TapsXnum(nanIdx) = []

TapsXnum = 1×4

94 200 88 2

TapsYnum(nanIdx) = []

TapsYnum = 1×4

94 200 88 2

Lastly, I suspicious as to why your numeric values are represented as strings in the first place. If the are read in that way from a file, the best solution might be to read them in correctly as numeric values. Why are they strings?

[Emily Platt]

perfect thank you. im working on exisitng data, they saved the data as strings

[Adam Danz]

You shouldn't have too much trouble adapting that to your data. If you have any trouble show us what you've got and I can help straighten it out.

Answer 2

[Mathieu NOE]

hello

remove first the empty cells , example below (R is the cell array)

R = R(~cellfun('isempty',R));
plot(cell2mat(R))

[Adam Danz]

The output is a char array. If R is a row vector, then the output is one long char vector.

R = {'123' '' '' '' '200' '' '' '321' '' ''}';
R = R(~cellfun('isempty',R))

R = 3×1 cell array
    {'123'}
    {'200'}
    {'321'}

cell2mat(R)

ans = 3×3 char array
    '123'
    '200'
    '321'