Matlab, Convert cell to matrix - matlab

Question

Hope some of you can help me. I have converted a pdf with a lot of txt and tables to .txt file. I did this because three values of the pdf has to be writen into exel. This has to be done more than a thusind times a mounth, therefore i thought there has to be a better eay than doing it manually. The only things that has to be extracted is the Date, Repport number and a single volume. I found out that the date and repport number always is at the same line, so thats pretty easy to extract, even though its readen into a 145x1 cell. But this brings me to my first question.
Each of the cells looks like this:
Date 23/4-2015
Repportnumber 8
How do i remove the whitespace?
I also have to extract the volume. this was more difficult, cause the linemunber of the volume differentiates from one pdf to another, therefore i created a searchfunction, which works and founds the volume, which is created to a cellarry looking like this:
[233.4 452.2 94.6]
I only needs the middlenumber, so how do i create this into a matrix?
Keep in mind it is a 1x1 cell, with whitespace!
Hope some of you guys can help me.

Answer 1

For your first question, you can remove the spaces by searching the line of characters and identifying the spaces with strcmp, then setting those elements of the character string to be empty ([]). Here is an example of the code for that:
% number of character
N = length(my_string);
% character to remove (initialize all 0)
icut = zeros(1,N);
% check each character
for i = 1:N;
% if character is a space, tag for removal
if strcmp(my_string(i),' ');
icut(i) = 1;
end
end
% remove space characters
my_string(icut == 1) = [];
For your second question, you can convert the contents of the cell to a numeric array then simply take the 2nd element.
% convert the cell contents to an array of numbers
cell_array = str2num(my_cell{1});
% get the middle value
middle_value = cell_array(2);
This assumes the cell contains the array of values as a string, as in my_cell = {'[233.4 452.2 94.6]'};.

Answer 2

You can remove the whitespace from a string using strrep. This works on cells containing strings or on char arrays and returns the same object type that it was applied to. If you pass in a cell to strrep it will return a cell, if you pass in a char array it will return a char array.
>> C = {'Date 23/4-2015 Repportnumber 8'};
>> strrep(C, ' ', '') % Cell containing string (char array)
ans =
'Date23/4-2015Repportnumber8'
>> strrep(C{1}, ' ', '') % String (char array)
ans =
Date23/4-2015Repportnumber8
To convert the version cell array to a matrix you can use str2num. Then you can use linear indexing to extract the correct version.
>> C = {'[233.4 452.2 94.6]'};
>> C = str2num(C{1});
>> C(2)
ans =
452.2000