Replace values in one column in multiple cells in array

I'm trying to replace the 5th column in each cell in a cell array with the 5th column of each cell from another cell array. I made the following function, which does this but also replaces the values in all other columns with 0. How do I do this without deleting all other values from the other columns. The function is:

 function [X]=replace_cells(cell) 
 X={};
 for i=1:length(cell)
   X{i}(:,[5])=cell{i}(:,[5]);
 end

[Amos]

what is the content of the cells? ist it matrices? and you want to modify the fifth column of each of those matrices? maybe you can give a full example including a test cell array?

[mzaya]

Yes the first cell array contains 1X30 cells of nX7 matrices and I just want to replace the 5th column in each of these matrices with the 5th column of another similar cell array(also with 1X30 cells of nX7 matrices)

[Amos]

then I can't see why your code should not work ... if you post a full example (including test cell arrays), people can have a look at the issue

edit: wait, you shouldn't initialize X as empty cell array, but rather give it as an input to your function...

[mzaya]

Yes that was the main issue, thanks! New code is as follows and it works:

function X=replace_cells(c,X)
  for i=1:length(c)
     X{i}(:,5)=c{i}(:,5);
  end
end

Answer 1

[Amos]

Maybe try:

 function [X]=replace_cells(cell,X) 

 for i=1:length(cell)
   X{i}(:,[5])=cell{i}(:,[5]);
 end

[Guillaume]

Please replace the variable name cell with something that is not a matlab function. While it does not cause any problem in this short function, it is still confusing to the casual reader.

For that matter, using meaningful names for all variables would be much better. How about:

function destination = replace_cell(destination, source, column)
    assert(size(destination) == size(source));
    for cidx = 1:numel(source) 
       destination{cix}(:, column) = source{cidx}(:, column);
    end
end

Also note that I'm using numel instead of length. My version works regardless of the shape of source and destination (vector, 2D, 3D, ND) as long as they're the same size. The original code with length would utterly fail on 2D or ND cell arrays.

[Amos]

Indeed, this suggestion is much better Matlab code.