Combining to two Cells

I 've scouring the web to find a solution but not much success

p = [{2323}]; k = {'hello'};

where I want pk = {'2323hello'}

Pretty much what the concatenate function in excel would do.

Thanks, Stephan

Answer 1

[Brendan Hamm]

One of the issues you will face here is that what is stored in the cell array p is numeric data and concatenation of numeric data with character arrays will convert the numeric value to its ASCII representation.

>> A = [2323,'hello']
A =
ओhello

This is not what you are looking for. So, you need to convert the number to a character array using num2str:

>> A = [num2str(2323),'hello']
A =
2323hello

Now if this data is stored in cells we can simply concatenate the contents (which are the char arrays):

p = {2323}; % Brackets around {} are not necessary.
k = {'hello'};
A = {[num2str(p{:}),k{:}]}; % Convert num to a string, concatenate, place back in cell

If we were then to presume that these variables had a larger (but equal) size:

p = {2323;3434}
k = {'hello';'goodbye'}
for n = 1:length(p)
    A(n) = {[num2str(p{n,1}),k{n,1}]};
end

disp(A)

[Stephan Richtering]

Thanks Brendan. Your last solution is what I was working towards.

It also seems to work if p is a mixture of strings and numbers which is what I was looking for.

Answer 2

[Star Strider]

Using sprintf is one option:

p = {2323}; k = {'hello'};
pk = {sprintf('%d%s', p{:}, char(k))}

pk = 
    '2323hello'

[Stephan Richtering]

Thanks for you answer Star, you're solution works.

[Star Strider]

My pleasure.

Answer 3

[Vaibhav Awale]

Hi,

This can be done using the following command:

>> pk = {[num2str(p{:}), k{:}]}

Refer to following documentation for more information about how cell array indexing works:

http://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/access-data-in-a-cell-array.html

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Vaibhav

[Stephan Richtering]

Hi Vaibhav,

Thanks for the answer. Seems to work for that example but what if I didn't know if p was a number or string would this still work?

Thanks, Stephan

[Vaibhav Awale]

Hi Stephan,

Interestingly "num2str" function returns the string if you give string as an input. So, this approach would work even when "p" is a string!

Regards,

Vaibhav