Convert cell array of numbers to matrix (cell2mat) while converting empties to zeros

Question

I have a function that uses strfind in a cellfun call to find which string items in a cell array match a specified string. For example:

cellfun( @(x) strfind( x , 'openmask'), fileNames, 'uniformoutput', false)

The original cell matrix is like this:

fileNames = {'sub11att-openmask.txt', 'sub13det-masking', ...};

The result for this looks like this:

[10]    []    [10]    []    [9]    []

I am trying to find a function that will convert this to:

10  0  10  0  9  0

Using cell2mat I get:

10  10  9

So I have to use this currently:

x(cellfun('isempty', x))={0};
cell2mat(x);

Is there a function that is cleaner than this (i.e. a one-liner solution)?

Thanks.

Answer 1

This works even if there are several occurrences of the sought string. It finds the first such occurrence if there's any, or gives 0 otherwise:

result = cellfun(@(x) sum(min(strfind(x, 'openmask'))), fileNames);

The code uses min to keep the first occurrence. This will give either a number or []. Then sum transforms [] into 0.

If you prefer to keep the last occurrence, change min to max or use Sardar Usama's suggestion:

result = cellfun(@(x) max([0 strfind(x, 'openmask')]), fileNames);