Combining Data from different Cells in a cell array

5 views (last 30 days)
So I've been hunting through the answer community, and I have yet to find what I'm looking for. What I'm attempting to do is combine 2 cell arrays so that the cells actually merge together, without using a for loop. What I have are two large cell arrays, one that contains the x coordinates and another that contains the y coordinates. I would like to put them together so that each cell contains both the x and y in two serperate columns.
For example
xcoordinate = {[1;2;3],[3;4;5;6]} %cell array with column vectors in each cell
ycoordinate = {[8;9;10],[12;16;17;10]} %cell array with column vectors in each cell
What I would like the product to be Without using a For loop is:
XYcoordinates = {[1 8;
2 9;
3 10]
[3 12;
4 16;
5 17;
6 10]}
It needs to be in this format with the [x y] sitting next to each other for a function I want to use with cellfun. If you have any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
-Michelle
  1 Comment
Jan
Jan on 30 Jul 2013
Why do you want to avoid a FOR loop? Most likely the the cellfun appraoch is slower, so I do not see the benefit.

Sign in to comment.

Accepted Answer

Azzi Abdelmalek
Azzi Abdelmalek on 30 Jul 2013
cellfun(@(x,y) [x y],xcoordinate',ycoordinate','un',0)
  1 Comment
Michelle
Michelle on 30 Jul 2013
Awesome. I knew it had to be something simple like this, but I completely missed this solution. It does exactly what I wanted it to do. Thanks!

Sign in to comment.

More Answers (2)

Jan
Jan on 30 Jul 2013
Why do you want to avoid a FOR loop? Most likely the the cellfun approach is slower, so I do not see the benefit. So compare the speed:
XYCoordinate = cell(size(xcoordinate));
for iC = 1:numel(xcoordinate)
XYCoordinate{iC} = [xcoordinate{iC}, ycoordinate{iC}];
end

Andrei Bobrov
Andrei Bobrov on 30 Jul 2013
strcat(xcoordinate',ycoordinate')

Categories

Find more on Data Types in Help Center and File Exchange

Community Treasure Hunt

Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!

Start Hunting!