Single quotes around dataset elements in 2017a?

In MATLAB 2017a, when I load a dataset, say, cities.mat, all the city names come with single quotes around them, as shown in the attached file. When I call, say, the 5th element, it returns the city name with the quotation marks. Moreover, there is no way of getting rid of them through indexing.

When I run the same dataset in 2014a, for example, the quotes are not there. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Those quotation marks are not present in the input: they are part of the display. You would see the same thing if you went to the MATLAB command prompt and typed

'A'

Because are only part of the display representation you do not need to do anything about them unless you are dealing with display representation matters -- in which case you could continue to use fprintf()

Answer 2

[Chuck]

That is what I thought too. But it is not that (or I'm missing something). If you look at the attached photo, the city name in the command window is followed by a lot of spaces and then a quote. These spaces come from the city name with the longest name. So if you say those spaces don't matter, I think I got my answer. But they are really annoying.

[Walter Roberson]

You appear to have a char array.

>> char({'hello';'sam'})
ans =
  2×5 char array
    'hello'
    'sam  '

Char arrays are blank padded to the length of the longest entry, because they are rectangular.

You can disp() the variable to have it come out without the '' . The blanks will still be there: you just will not observe them under typical conditions.

[Steven Lord]

If you're using release R2016b or later, you could use a string array to store your text data unpadded. If you're using an earlier release, instead of storing your text data as a char matrix you could store it as a cell array, each cell of which contains a char vector. Walter used this cellstr technique in constructing the char matrix containing 'hello' and 'sam'.

[Walter Roberson]

Note that string() applied to a char array will leave the individual results blank padded. You could

strtrim(string(YourCharArray))

or you could

string(cellstr(YourCharArray)))

On the other hand, string data shows up with "" instead of '' so you do not remove the problem of the delimiters showing up in the default output format.