Is it possible to have a column data with some numerical values and some strings?

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I have some really large data with millions of rows. I would have a column with 95% of them being numerical and 5% being strings. For example:
A = [53; 6; 77; 26b; 47; d33; 2; 5; c4; 77; 6];
As you know, in Matlab, A would be stored as a string column. Here is the problem, when I export them into Excel, you would see an error (yellow arrow) saying numer stored as a text. I would have to go through the entire column to click "convert to number", so as to remove these errors.
So how do I store the column data A so that some of them will be numerical and some of them will be strings. Here is what I did:
B = str2double(A); % strings will be converted to NaN
Ind = ~isnan(B); % only identify rows that are not NaNs
A(Ind) = str2double(A(Ind)); % only convert strings that can be converted to numerical values to numerical.
Theoretical it will work. Unfortunately, Matlab will store all vallues of A as strings again.
Anyone knows how to solve this issue?

Accepted Answer

Fangjun Jiang
Fangjun Jiang on 4 Dec 2020
Where does A come from? In MATLAB, A can not be stored as A = [53; 26b] or A={53; 26b}.
If the source data comes from Excel file, you can use [Num,Txt,Raw]=xlsread() to read and then process to get a cell array of numerical and string data.
  3 Comments
Fangjun Jiang
Fangjun Jiang on 4 Dec 2020
Construct a cell array from numerical and string data and then export
A=[1;2;3];
b={'b';'c'};
A=num2cell(A);
A=vertcat(A,b);

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