MATLAB Programming

2 Data Types
name = ['Thomas R. Lee
'; 'Senior Developer'];
A simpler way to create string arrays is to use the char function. char
automatically pads all strings to the length of the longest input string. In the
following example, char pads the 13-character input string 'Thomas R. Lee'
with three trailing blanks so that it will be as long as the second string:
name = char('Thomas R. Lee','Senior Developer')
name =
Thomas R. Lee
Senior Developer
When extracting strings from an array, use the deblank function to remove
any trailing blanks:
trimname = deblank(name(1,:))
trimname =
Thomas R. Lee
size(trimname)
ans =
1 13
Expanding Character Arrays
Expandingthesizeofanexistingcharacterarraybyassigningadditional
characters to indices beyond the bounds of the array such that part of the
array becomes padded with zeros, is generally not recommended. See the
documentation on “Expanding a Character Array” on page 1-31 in the
MATLAB Programming documentation.
Cell Arrays of Strings
Creating strings in a regular MATLAB array requires that all strings in the
array be of the same length. This often means that you have to pad blanks at
the end of strings to equalize their length. However, another type of MATLAB
array, the cell array, can hold different sizes and types of data in an array
without padding. Cell arrays provide a more flexible way to store strings of
varying length.
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