delimiting by a char but not deleting it - matlab

Question

I have a text file that looks like this:
(a (bee (cold down)))
if I load it using
c=textscan(fid,'%s');
I get this:
'(a'
'(bee'
'(cold'
'down)))'
What I would like to get is:
'('
'a'
'('
'bee'
'('
'cold'
'down'
')'
')'
')'
I know I can delimit with '(' and ')' by specifying 'Delimiter' in textscan, but then I will loose this character, which I want to keep.
Thank you in Advance.

Answer 1

The %s specifier indicates that you want Strings, what you want is individual chars. Use %c instead .
c=textscan(fid,'%c');
Update if you want too keep your words intact then you'll want to load your text using the %s specifier. After the text is loaded you can either solve this problem with Regular Expressions (not my forte) or write your own parser then parses each word individually and saves the paranthesis and words to a new cell array.

Answer 2

AFAIK, there is no canned routine capable of preserving arbitrary delimiters.
You'd have to do it yourself:
string = '(a (bee (cold down)))';
bo = string == '(';
bc = string == ')';
sp = string == ' ';
output = cell(nnz(bo|bc|sp)+1,1);
j = 1;
for ii = 1:numel(string)
if bo(ii)
output{j} = '(';
j = j + 1;
elseif bc(ii)
output{j} = ')';
j = j + 1;
elseif sp(ii)
j = j + 1;
else
output{j} = [output{j} string(ii)];
end
end
Which can probably be improved -- the growing character array will prevent the loop from being JIT'ed. The array bc | bo | sp holds all the information to vectorize this thing, I just don't see how at this hour...
Nevertheless, it should give you a place to start.

Answer 3

Matlab has a strtok function similar to C. Its format is:
token = strtok(str)
token = strtok(str, delimiter)
[token, remain] = strtok('str', ...)
there is also a string replace function strrep:
modifiedStr = strrep(origStr, oldSubstr, newSubstr)
What I would do is modify the original string with strrep to add in delimiters, then use strtok. Since you already scanned the string into c:
c = (c,'(','( '); %Add a space after each open paren
c = (c,')',' ) '); % Add a space before and after each close paren
token = zeros(10); preallocate for speed
i = 2;
[token(1), remain] = strtok(c, ' ');
while(remain)
[token(i), remain] = strtok(c, ' ');
i =i + 1;
end
gives you the linear token array of each of the string you requested.
strtok reference: http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/strtok.html
strrep reference: http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/strrep.html