Parsing string of a cell to cell

Question

I have the following string in MATLAB:

contents = '{'aa' 'bb' 'cc' 'dd'}'

I need to get the 1x4 cell-array inside it, like:

mycell = {'aa' 'bb' 'cc' 'dd'}

How would you do it? Is there a quicker way than parsing it?

Answer 1

Don't forget the double quote inside the string and use eval (ugly solution but simple and working).

>> contents = '{''aa'' ''bb'' ''cc'' ''dd''}'

contents =

{'aa' 'bb' 'cc' 'dd'}

>> c = eval(contents)

c = 

    'aa'    'bb'    'cc'    'dd'

>> class(c)

ans =

cell

>> c{2}

ans =

bb