Question

I met a problem here, I have a cell like below. Two vectors and each row there is either a number or an acronym

'  33572'                                    '  AGCHIN'  
'  46058'                                    '  ABCHIN'  
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  48188'   
'  45913'                                    '  NINGBO'  
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  46701'   
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  30118'   
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  33076'   
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  46799'   
'  40749'                                    '  BITICLTD'
'  40440'                                    '  PARICHIN'
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  18925'   
'  16911'                                    '  CHANGSHA'
'  40220'                                    '  CHENGDU' 
'  32748'                                    '  CHISO'   
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  32378'   
'  48206'                                    '  CCBIAS'  
'  Non-banking Credit Institution'           '  23729'   
'  Specialised Governmental Credit Inst.'    '  43960'   
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  38203'   
'  38600'                                    '  CHMBIAS' 
'  45809'                                    '  MINSHENG'
'  23601'                                    '  PINGANTI'
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  42330'   
'  45550'                                    '  CHINESE' 
'  49481'                                    '  CHONGS'  
'  Investment Bank/Securities House'         '  32365'   
'  23602'                                    '  CITITI'  
'  39611'                                    '  LUOYANG' 
'  19950'                                    '  DALICITY'
'  23603'                                    '  DAILIANH'
'  17360'                                    '  DONGGUAN'
'  23604'                                    '  DONGGUTI'
'  39612'                                    '  DONGYING'
'  39060'                                    '  EVERGBC' 
'  42596'                                    '  EXPO'    
'  46703'                                    '  SINOBKU' 
'  34608'                                    '  FUJIAN'  
'  29182'                                    '  FUZHOU'  
'  35965'                                    '  GUANGDON'
'  29375'                                    '  GRCCOOP' 
'  29462'                                    '  GUOLIAN' 
'  29490'                                    '  HAITONG' 
'  18565'                                    '  HANGZIAS'
'  23730'                                    '  HANGZICT'
'  23758'                                    '  HARBIN'  
'  23420'                                    '  HEFEI'   
'  48411'                                    '  HETLONG' 
'  44174'                                    '  HUAX'    
'  Commercial Bank'                          '  29149'   
'  23421'                                    '  HUNAN'   

I want to extract numbers and put numbers into a single column, could anyone tell me how to do this? Thanks!

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, you want to extract the numbers and put them into a single column. For that you’ll have to filter out the non-numbers.

Cstr = cellfun(@str2num, {C{:}}, 'Uniform', 0); % # Convert strings to numbers
Cnums = Cstr(cellfun(@(v)~isempty(v), Cstr));   % # Remove empty strings

The empty cells are removed because str2num produces an empty vector when it operates on a string that contains non-digits characters.

Now we have a cell array containing only numbers. To convert the cell array to a column vector, just do:

nums = [Cnums{:}].'

It should yield the following:

nums =

       33572
       46058
       45913
       40749
       40440
       16911
       40220
       32748
       48206
       ...