Question

I have a cell array that needs to be printed in a .txt file according to a specific format. I have tried some of the online help (including matlab central dlmcell but even that is not giving me the desired answer. Delimiter is \t.

cellarray = { ...
        'AAPL' '2/20/2011' 100.5 
        'MSFT' '2/15/2011' 43.4551
            } ;

The output should be in a .txt file with the following format: (using tab delimiter)

"AAPL"    "2/20/2011"    100.5
"MSFT"    "2/15/2011"    43.4551

The cell will have minimum of 8000 rows and a maximum of 15000. No rows would have empty columns. Is a vectorized solution possible? Shall appreciate your help.

Answer 1

The following will work for your example:

C = cellarray.';
fid = fopen('file.dlm', 'wt');
fprintf(fid, '"%s"\t"%s"\t%g\n', C{:});
fclose(fid);

MATLAB reuses the formatting string until it runs out of inputs. In principle, you could construct the formatting string first:

fstr = '';
for ic = 1:size(cellarray,2)
   switch class(cellarray{1,ic})
       case 'char'
           fstr = [fstr '"%s"'];
       otherwise
           % Assume numeric
           fstr = [fstr '%g'];
   end
   if ic < size(cellarray,2), fstr = [fstr '\t']; else fstr = [fstr '\n']; end
end

Then

C = cellarray.';
fid = fopen('file.dlm', 'wt');
fprintf(fid, fstr, C{:});
fclose(fid);