Concatenate two cell arrays of strings with a space in between?

Question

How can I concatenate:

A = {'hello'; 'hi'; 'hey'}

with

B = {'Ben'; 'Karen'; 'Lisa'}

with a space in between to get:

C = {'hello Ben'; 'hi Karen'; 'hey Lisa'}

Is there a fast non-looping way?

Answer 1

You can use strcat(), although it performs a loop:

strcat(A,{' '}, B)

where the blank is preserved by enclosing it within a cell.

Alternatively, FEX:CStrCatStr is a mex routine which achieves a 10x speedup (depending on testing environment):

CStrCatStr(A,' ', B)