Matlab: Function that returns a string with the first n characters of the alphabet - matlab

I'd like to have a function generate(n) that generates the first n lowercase characters of the alphabet appended in a string (therefore: 1<=n<=26)
For example:
generate(3) --> 'abc'
generate(5) --> 'abcde'
generate(9) --> 'abcdefghi'
I'm new to Matlab and I'd be happy if someone could show me an approach of how to write the function. For sure this will involve doing arithmetic with the ASCII-codes of the characters - but I've no idea how to do this and which types that Matlab provides to do this.

I would rely on ASCII codes for this. You can convert an integer to a character using char.
So for example if we want an "e", we could look up the ASCII code for "e" (101) and write:
char(101)
'e'
This also works for arrays:
char([101, 102])
'ef'
The nice thing in your case is that in ASCII, the lowercase letters are all the numbers between 97 ("a") and 122 ("z"). Thus the following code works by taking ASCII "a" (97) and creating an array of length n starting at 97. These numbers are then converted using char to strings. As an added bonus, the version below ensures that the array can only go to 122 (ASCII for "z").
function output = generate(n)
output = char(97:min(96 + n, 122));
end
Note: For the upper limit we use 96 + n because if n were 1, then we want 97:97 rather than 97:98 as the second would return "ab". This could be written as 97:(97 + n - 1) but the way I've written it, I've simply pulled the "-1" into the constant.
You could also make this a simple anonymous function.
generate = #(n)char(97:min(96 + n, 122));
generate(3)
'abc'
To write the most portable and robust code, I would probably not want those hard-coded ASCII codes, so I would use something like the following:
output = 'a':char(min('a' + n - 1, 'z'));

...or, you can just generate the entire alphabet and take the part you want:
function str = generate(n)
alphabet = 'a':'z';
str = alphabet(1:n);
end
Note that this will fail with an index out of bounds error for n > 26, so you might want to check for that.

You can use the char built-in function which converts an interger value (or array) into a character array.
EDIT
Bug fixed (ref. Suever's comment)
function [str]=generate(n)
a=97;
% str=char(a:a+n)
str=char(a:a+n-1)
Hope this helps.
Qapla'

Related

Converting a .txt file with 1 million digits of "e" into a vector in matlab

I have a text file with 1 million decimal digits of "e" number with 80 digits on each line excluding the first and the last line which have 76 and 4 digits and the file has 12501 lines. I want to convert it into a vector in matlab with each digit on each row. I tried num2str function, but the problem is that it gets converted like for example '7.1828e79' (13 characters). What can I do?
P.S.1: The first two lines of the text file (76 and 80 digits) are:
7182818284590452353602874713526624977572470936999595749669676277240766303535 47594571382178525166427427466391932003059921817413596629043572900334295260595630
P.S.2: I used "dlmread" and got a 12501x1 vector, with the first and second row of 7.18281828459045e+75 and 4.75945713821785e+79 and the problem is that when I use num2str for example for the first row value, I get: '7.182818284590453e+75' as a string and not the whole 76 digits. My aim was to do something like this:
e1=dlmread('e.txt');
es1=num2str(e1);
for i=1:12501
for j=1:length(es1(1,:))
a1((i-1)*length(es1(1,:))+j)=es1(i,j);
end
end
e_digits=a1.';
but I get a string like this:
a1='7.182818284590453e+754.759457138217852e+797.381323286279435e+799.244761460668082e+796.133138458300076e+791.416928368190255e+79 5...'
with 262521 characters instead of 1 million digits.
P.S.3: I think the problem might be solved if I can manipulate the text file in a way that I have one digit on each line and simply use dlmread.
Well, this is not hard, there are many ways to do it.
So first you want to load in your file as a Char Array using something simple like (you want a Char Array so that you can easily manipulate it to forget about the lines breaks) :
C = fileread('yourfile.txt'); %loads file as Char Array
D = C(~isspace(C)); %Removes SPACES which are line-breaks
Next, you want to actually append a SPACE between each char (this is because you want to use the num2str transform - and matlab needs to see the space), you can do this using a RESHAPE, a STRTRIM or simply a REGEX:
E = strtrim(regexprep(D, '.{1}', '$0 ')); %Add a SPACE after each Numeric Digit
Now you can transform it using str2num into a Vector:
str2num(E)'; %Converts the Char Array back to Vector
which will give you a single digit each row.
Using your example, I get a vector of 156 x 1, with 1 digit each row as you required.
You can get a digit per row like this
fid = fopen('e.txt','r');
c = textscan(fid,'%s');
c=cat(1,c{:});
c = cellfun(#(x) str2num(reshape(x,[],1)),c,'un',0);
c=cat(1,c{:});
And it is not the only possible way.
Could you please tell what is the final task, how do you plan using the array of e digits?

Using fscanf in MATLAB to read an unknown number of columns

I want to use fscanf for reading a text file containing 4 rows with an unknown number of columns. The newline is represented by two consecutive spaces.
It was suggested that I pass : as the sizeA parameter but it doesn't work.
How can I read in my data?
update: The file format is
String1 String2 String3
10 20 30
a b c
1 2 3
I have to fill 4 arrays, one for each row.
See if this will work for your application.
fid1=fopen('test.txt');
i=1;
check=0;
while check~=1
str=fscanf(fid1,'%s',1);
if strcmp(str,'')~=1;
string(i)={str};
end
i=i+1;
check=strcmp(str,'');
end
fclose(fid1);
X=reshape(string,[],4);
ar1=X(:,1)
ar2=X(:,2)
ar3=X(:,3)
ar4=X(:,4)
Once you have 'ar1','ar2','ar3','ar4' you can parse them however you want.
I have found a solution, i don't know if it is the only one but it works fine:
A=fscanf(fid,'%[^\n] *\n')
B=sscanf(A,'%c ')
Z=fscanf(fid,'%[^\n] *\n')
C=sscanf(Z,'%d')
....
You could use
rawText = getl(fid);
lines = regexp(thisLine,' ','split);
tokens = {};
for ix = 1:numel(lines)
tokens{end+1} = regexp(lines{ix},' ','split'};
end
This will give you a cell array of strings having the row and column shape or your original data.
To read an arbitrary line of text then break it up according the the formating information you have available. My example uses a single space character.
This uses regular expressions to define the separator. Regular expressions powerful but too complex to describe here. See the MATLAB help for regexp and regular expressions.

Read specific character from cell-array of string

I have an cell-array of dimensions 1x6 like this:
A = {'25_2.mat','25_3.mat','25_4.mat','25_5.mat','25_6.mat','25_7.mat'};
I want to read for example from the A{1} , the number after the '_' i.e 2 for my example
Using cellfun, strfind and str2double
out = cellfun(#(x) str2double(x(strfind(x,'_')+1:strfind(x,'.')-1)),A)
How does it work?
This code simply finds the index of character one number after the occurrence of '_'. Lets call it as start_index. Then finds the character one number lesser than the index of occurrence of '.' character. Lets call it as end_index. Then retrieves all the characters between start_index and end_index. Finally converts those characters to numbers using str2double.
Sample Input:
A = {'2545_23.mat','2_3.mat','250_4.mat','25_51.mat','25_6.mat','25_7.mat'};
Output:
>> out
out =
23 3 4 51 6 7
You can access the contents of the cell by using the curly braces{...}. Once you have access to the contents, you can use indexes to access the elements of the string as you would do with a normal array. For example:
test = {'25_2.mat', '25_3.mat', '25_4.mat', '25_5.mat', '25_6.mat', '25_7.mat'}
character = test{1}(4);
If your string length is variable, you can use strfind to find the index of the character you want.
Assuming the numbers are non-negative integers after the _ sign: use a regular expression with lookbehind, and then convert from string to number:
numbers = cellfun(#(x) str2num(x{1}), regexp(A, '(?<=\_)\d+', 'match'));

Function to split string in matlab and return second number

I have a string and I need two characters to be returned.
I tried with strsplit but the delimiter must be a string and I don't have any delimiters in my string. Instead, I always want to get the second number in my string. The number is always 2 digits.
Example: 001a02.jpg I use the fileparts function to delete the extension of the image (jpg), so I get this string: 001a02
The expected return value is 02
Another example: 001A43a . Return values: 43
Another one: 002A12. Return values: 12
All the filenames are in a matrix 1002x1. Maybe I can use textscan but in the second example, it gives "43a" as a result.
(Just so this question doesn't remain unanswered, here's a possible approach: )
One way to go about this uses splitting with regular expressions (MATLAB's strsplit which you mentioned):
str = '001a02.jpg';
C = strsplit(str,'[a-zA-Z.]','DelimiterType','RegularExpression');
Results in:
C =
'001' '02' ''
In older versions of MATLAB, before strsplit was introduced, similar functionality was achieved using regexp(...,'split').
If you want to learn more about regular expressions (abbreviated as "regex" or "regexp"), there are many online resources (JGI..)
In your case, if you only need to take the 5th and 6th characters from the string you could use:
D = str(5:6);
... and if you want to convert those into numbers you could use:
E = str2double(str(5:6));
If your number is always at a certain position in the string, you can simply index this position.
In the examples you gave, the number is always the 5th and 6th characters in the string.
filename = '002A12';
num = str2num(filename(5:6));
Otherwise, if the formating is more complex, you may want to use a regular expression. There is a similar question matlab - extracting numbers from (odd) string. Modifying the code found there you can do the following
all_num = regexp(filename, '\d+', 'match'); %Find all numbers in the filename
num = str2num(all_num{2}) %Convert second number from str

Capitalizing only the first letters without changing any numbers or punctuation

I would like to modify a string that will have make the first letter capitalized and all other letters lower cased, and anything else will be unchanged.
I tried this:
function new_string=switchCase(str1)
%str1 represents the given string containing word or phrase
str1Lower=lower(str1);
spaces=str1Lower==' ';
caps1=[true spaces];
%we want the first letter and the letters after space to be capital.
strNew1=str1Lower;
strNew1(caps1)=strNew1(caps1)-32;
end
This function works nicely if there is nothing other than a letter after space. If we have anything else for example:
str1='WOW ! my ~Code~ Works !!'
Then it gives
new_string =
'Wow My ^code~ Works !'
However, it has to give (according to the requirement),
new_string =
'Wow! My ~code~ Works !'
I found a code which has similarity with this problem. However, that is ambiguous. Here I can ask question if I don't understand.
Any help will be appreciated! Thanks.
Interesting question +1.
I think the following should fulfil your requirements. I've written it as an example sub-routine and broken down each step so it is obvious what I'm doing. It should be straightforward to condense it into a function from here.
Note, there is probably also a clever way to do this with a single regular expression, but I'm not very good with regular expressions :-) I doubt a regular expression based solution will run much faster than what I've provided (but am happy to be proven wrong).
%# Your example string
Str1 ='WOW ! my ~Code~ Works !!';
%# Convert case to lower
Str1 = lower(Str1);
%# Convert to ascii
Str1 = double(Str1);
%# Find an index of all locations after spaces
I1 = logical([0, (Str1(1:end-1) == 32)]);
%# Eliminate locations that don't contain lower-case characters
I1 = logical(I1 .* ((Str1 >= 97) & (Str1 <= 122)));
%# Check manually if the first location contains a lower-case character
if Str1(1) >= 97 && Str1(1) <= 122; I1(1) = true; end;
%# Adjust all appropriate characters in ascii form
Str1(I1) = Str1(I1) - 32;
%# Convert result back to a string
Str1 = char(Str1);