Handling character array rather than cell

Hello,

I have a text file (file name: X) having identifiers with 64 byte characters. I used textscan function to read the identifiers in MATLAB as follows:

fid = fopen('X','r');
data = textscan(fid,'%64c','delimiter',',');

As a results, I have a cell of records having 64 byte identifiers. My question is how to have a character array instead of a cell?

I can use function char() to change a cell into a character array:

data = char(data);

But I want to generate a character array when I read the text file using textscan because char() function requires another long time to execute.

Thank you for your attention.

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

data{:}

[Yongmin]

Hello Azzi,

Do you mean use data{:} instead of using char() ? I will try to use the command.

Thanks a lot for your answer!!

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

fid = fopen('X','r');
data = textscan(fid,'%64c','delimiter',',');
data = data{1};   %extracts array of char from cell array

When you use %c format in textscan the corresponding output is an array of character; and as usual, the outputs are all encapsulated in a cell array.

This differs from using %s format in textscan, in which case the corresponding output is a cell array of strings, which is something you might want to apply char() to in order to create a character array.

There is no way to get textscan to return values not encapsulated in a cell array. There is, however, no conversion time to use data{1} to get at the character array.

[Yongmin]

Dear Walter Robserson,

Thanks a lot for your kind explanation. I understand the limitation of textscan function.