Matlab: convert cell to readable format

Question

Thanks in advance for the help.

I have an array of values that looks like this

[[1x5 double]; [1x2 double]; ....]

I would like to convert this to this

['12345'; '12'; ....]

cell2mat sort of does what I want, but I end up getting this

[['1' '2' '3' '4' '5']; ['1' '2'];...]

I have been all over the matlab documentation and haven't found a way to do this. Really all I want is to convert [1x5 double] to a string (I can't convert to a num because I don't want to drop insignificant zeros). Is there an simple easy way to do this besides doing this by hand with for loops?

Answer 1

If input_array is your input array, try this cellfun + num2str based approach -

cellfun(@(x) num2str(x,'%1d'), input_array,'uni',0)

---

Example -

%// Input array
input_array = {randi(9,1,5)-1;randi(9,1,2)-1}

%// Display the cell array values for verification of results later on
celldisp(input_array)

%// Output
out = cellfun(@(x) num2str(x,'%1d'), input_array,'uni',0)

Output (on run) -

input_array = 
    [1x5 double]
    [1x2 double]

input_array{1} =
     3     6     0     5     3
input_array{2} =
     6     2

out = 
    '36053'
    '62'