Question

given a simple delimiter separated text database, I want to construct a regexp rule, which returns the column / field entries.

given the following two example lines

entry1 = '|123|some|string   |101112  |'
entry2 = '|123|some|  |101112  |'

i want to get the following output:

values1 = '123', 'some', 'string', '101112'
values2 = '123', 'some', '', '101112'

so far I’m using the following regexp and regexprep combination:

values = regexp(regexprep(entry '[\s]', ''), '\|', 'split')

which unfortunately returns the following:

values1 =  ''    '123'    'some'    'string'    '101112'    ''
values2 =  ''    '123'    'some'    ''    '101112'    ''

but I want to get (no extra '' before the 123 and not extra '' after '101112'):

values1 = '123', 'some', 'string', '101112'
values2 = '123', 'some', '', '101112'

given my regexp rule, why do I get the '' at the beginning and the end? How do I have to change my regexp rule, to only return the field values?

Answer 1

I am not sure it is exactly what you are asking for, but you can use strread:

strread(entry1(2:end),'%d','delimiter','|')
ans =
         123
         456
         789
      101112