remove whitespace from cell array

I have a cell array which looks something like this;

 'DS 5376'
    'FR 8241'
    'B 1257'
    'BG 09857'
    'TR 3017'

I want to remove the central white space (or any white space to that matter) to get the following

 'DS5376'
    'FR8241'
    'B1257'
    'BG09857'
    'TR3017'

Previous questions and suggested and I have tried using

cell_Array=strrep(cell_Array,' ','')

but to no avail - any ideas as to how I can acheive this?

Many thanks

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

If your example with strrep does not succeed, that would be because the whitespace is actually not a space. You can check what it is for sure by getting its ASCII value with:

double(cell_Array{1}(3))

If it is some other sort of whitespace (maybe a tab), you can use:

cell_Array = regexprep(cell_Array, '\s', '') %\s means any of \t, \f, \n, \r or \v

But if it is not, assuming your text is only letters, numbers or underscore, you can remove anything else with:

cell_Array = regexprep(cell_Array, '\W', '')

[jnaumann]

Hmm.. no success yet. I also tried this

flight_no=cellfun(@strrep,flight_no,' ','');

which gave this error

Error using cellfun
Input #3 expected to be a cell array, was
char instead.

Error in closest_distance_to_SLM (line 5)
flight_no=cellfun(@strrep,flight_no,' ','');

[jnaumann]

also your suggestion of

double(cell_Array{1}(3))

gave 32 which is a white space

[Guillaume]

What? None of the regexprep succeeded?

Can you show the output of

double(cell_Array{1}) %i.e. the ASCII values of the whole string

The proper syntax for the cellfun would be:

flight_no = cellfun(@(s) strrep(s, ' ', ''), flight_no, 'UniformOutput', false);

But strrep operates on cell array anyway, so there's no need for the cellfun anyway.

[jnaumann]

Your correction for the cellfun example worked - thanks a lot!

Answer 2

[Lev Vitkin]

flight_no = cellfun(@(s) s(~isspace(s)), flight_no, 'UniformOutput', false)