MATLAB: Cell to Number Array

Question

Hey,

I have created a Graph and I have extracted its edges source node as G.Edges.EndNodes(:,1) and the result is like that

 a=[G.Edges.EndNodes(:,1)]
 a =
   7×1 cell array
    '18'
    '26'
    '33'
    '52'
    '80'
    '86'
    '110

Now I have a reference file where I have strings that point to these nodes Names so I want it to extract like

 Names(18 26 33 52 80 86 110);

But I am unable to convert Cell array to number array . I tried converting cell array to Table & extracted table column 1 but the result is again a cell array since values in Table are of String Type.Also cell2mat command was not working directly.

So if there is some good way to automate this process since the actual data is large enough to manually handle it.

Answer 1

a = { '18'
    '26'
    '33'
    '52'
    '80'
    '86'
    '110' } ;
iwant = cellfun(@str2num,a)