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How to read formatted data from string in matlab?

I have cell array of strings with different values: 

v = {'12.4B', '145.3M', '34.3M', '1.2B'};

I would like to convert them to numbers. Using sscanf function I can extract only numeric values, but what I want is to multiply the result by billion or million according to the letter.

Solution

  • You can replace B and M with e9 and e6 respectively (scientific notation) using regular expression replacement (regexp) and then convert the resulting strings to a number with str2double.

    out = str2double(regexprep(v, {'B', 'M'}, {'e9', 'e6'}, 'ignorecase'))

    You can obviously expand this to include any other necessary conversions.

    And as an example showing what's happening:

    % Convert to scientific notation
B = regexprep(v, {'B', 'M'}, {'e9', 'e6'}, 'ignorecase')
%    '12.4e9'    '145.3e6'    '34.3e6'    '1.2e9'

% Convert to numbers
str2double(B)
%   12400000000 145300000   34300000    1200000000