Removing 'quotes' from a cell array

I have a cell array with 2 columns..

Column 1 is made up of 'a' ''b' 'c' '''d'

Column 2 is 123 456 678

I need to export this into a ASCII tab delimited file as a 123 b 456 c 678 ...

How can I remove the ' or '' or ''' quotes?

Thanks, S

[nour brh]

how can i remove the 'quotes' ??

[Rik]

Those quote are not part of the data stored in your table. They are only there in the visualisation.So if you could remove them, the result would be to replace them with NaN.

I will move your answer to the comment section, since it actually isn't an answer.

Answer 1

[Matt J]

The single quotes aren't really there. That's just MATLAB's way of enclosing/displaying a string. To get rid of the double quotes,

 strrep( YourArray(:,1),'"','');

[Matt J]

Here's a more complete example,

   E(:,1)={'a' '''b' 'c' '''d'}.';
   E(:,2)={123, 456, 678,876}.';

   E(:,1)=strrep(E(:,1),'''',''); %get rid of single quotes
   E(:,1)=strrep(E(:,1),'"',''); %get rid of double quotes

   %send to file 

   E=E.';

   fid=fopen('events.txt','w');

   for ii=1:numel(E)

       if ischar(E{ii})
           prec='%s';
       else
          prec='%d'; 
       end

    fprintf(fid,[prec '\t'],E{ii});

   end

   fclose(fid);

Answer 2

[susan]

Hi, That did not work..

How can I save this cell array (1159x2) to a text file (in the hopes that the quotes will not get saved)..

save('events','E','-ascii','-tabs') Warning: Attempt to write an unsupported data type to an ASCII file. Variable 'E' not written to file.

[Matt J]

Are you talking to me? If so, you should post this as a comment to my answer. What part didn't work? It gets rid of double quotes fine for me, e.g.

>> mycell={'dog"','"cat','"mouse"'}

mycell = 

      'dog"'    '"cat'    '"mouse"'

>> strrep(mycell,'"','') %double quotes gone

ans = 

      'dog'    'cat'    'mouse'

[susan]

Hi, Yes Sorry.. in my data the quotes seem to be introduced by the process sometime during save to .mat/text.. Can't retrace. And the quotes are not [' ''] but [''']. But I was able to get back the original data (i.e. with single quotes). I am however having trouble saving this to ascii format..

The original data is in this format

EEG.event

ans =

1x1159 struct array with fields: type latency urevent

 EEG.event(1,1)

ans =

       type: 'eyeo'
    latency: 166124
    urevent: 1

Then, E=struct2cell(EEG.event); E=[E(1,:) ; E(2,:)]';

It looks fine: 'TEND_b3_c' [645836] 'TSTRCo23_b3_c' [646153] 'Co23_b3_c' [646449] 'RTCo23_b3_c' [646655] 'TEND_b3_c' [646661]

save('Events','E','-ascii') Warning: Attempt to write an unsupported data type to an ASCII file. Variable 'E' not written to file.

[Matt J]

Did you see my solution above (the Comment to my original Answer)?