Question

I am using xlsread in MATLAB to read in sheets from an excel file. My goal is to have each column of the excel sheet read as a numeric array. One of the columns has a mix of numbers and numbers+char. For example, the values could be 200, 300A, 450, 500A, 200A, 100. here is what I have so far:

[num, txt, raw] = xlsread(fileIn, sheets{ii});    % Reading in each sheet from a for loop
myCol = raw(:, 4)                             % I want all rows of column 4
for kk=1:numel(myCol)
       if iscellstr(myCol(kk))
           myCol(kk) = (cellfun(@(x)strrep(x, 'A', ''), myCol(kk), 'UniformOutput', false));
       end
end

myCol = cell2mat(myCol);

This is able to strip off the char from the number but then I am left with:

myCol = 

[200]

'300'

[450]

'500'

'200'

[100]

which errors out on cell2mat with:

cell2mat(myCol)

??? Error using ==> cell2mat at 46

All contents of the input cell array must be of the same data type.

I feel like I am probably mixing up () and {} somewhere. Can someone help me out with this?

Answer 1

Let me start from reading the file

[num, txt, raw] = xlsread('test.xlsx');
myCol = raw(:, 4);

idx = cellfun(@ischar,myCol ); %# find strings
data = zeros(size(myCol)); %# preallocate matrix for numeric data
data(~idx) = cell2mat(myCol(~idx)); %# convert numeric data
data(idx) = str2double(regexprep(myCol(idx),'\D','')); %# remove non-digits and convert to numeric