How to keep 0s when converting data type?

I currently have a 6x4 cell. Most of the cells are populated with numbers, while the remaining have zeros. Using 'isnumeric' I have checked that the cells that contain numbers are actually characters, while those with zeros are numbers. I would like to convert the characters to numbers but am unsure how to do so and keep the zeros (they "disappear" when performing str2num since they are already numbers. How do I standardize a way to search for the characters/zeros and then have them all be numbers?

[Jan]

Posting some example data would be useful.

Answer 1

[Jan]

As far as I understand you have something like this:

C = {'123', 0,     '456.4'; ...
     0      '987', '3.14'}

Now convert all char vectors to numbers:

index    = cellfun('isclass', C, 'char');
C(index) = num2cell(str2double(C(index)))

C = {123, 0,   456.4; ...
     0    987, 3.14}

Does this match your needs?