Multiple commands in one, Matlab

Question

Sometimes it is desired to make several calls in one command. A simple example could be strrep. Assume you want to replace all parentheses with brackets, all commas with dots and then remove all double quotations. The following pseudo code could then be desired:

strrep(myString, '()', '[]', ',', '.', '"', '')

Is there any way to accomplish this? You could of course go with:

strrep(strrep(strrep(myString, '()', '[]'), ',', '.'), '"', '')

Or save the strings in a cell array and use this in a for loop, but both solutions are incredibly ugly.

The most desired answer, is one that is generic for all functions that work in a similar way.

Answer 1

To directly answer your question, there is really no consistent way of doing this, no. It really depends on the function. If you search the documentation you will often find a way to do this. With strings, at least, you can usually pass cell arrays in place of strings to perform operations on multiple strings, and in this case multiple operations on the same string.

A Solution for This Particular Example

You can easily use regexprep to do this for you. You can pass a cell array of the expressions to match with a corresponding cell array of the replacement values.

regexprep('abc', {'a', 'b', 'c'}, {'1', '2', '3'});

%// '123'

For your specific example, you would do something like:

regexprep(myString, {'\(\)', ',', '"'}, {'[]', '.', ''})

And as an example:

myString = 'This, is a () "string"';
regexprep(myString, {'\(\)', ',', '"'}, {'[]', '.', ''})

%// 'This. is a [] string'

If you don't want to worry about escaping all of the expressions to be regex-compatible, you can use regexptranslate to do that for you.

expressions = regexptranslate('escape', {'()', ',', '"'});
regexprep(myString, expressions, {'[]', '.', ''});