MATLAB: Convert letters to numbers in cell

Question

Hello,

I have a cell array that looks like :

{A, E, B, A, D, C; B, A, A, D, C, E}

for 9×28 cell

I want to replace A's with 5 for columns 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, 19, 22, 23 ,24 ,26 27 and replace E's with 5 for columns 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28

so that for some columns, A-E ranges from 5-1 and for others A-E ranges from 1-5.

i have tried:

mydata = cell2mat(mydata);

mydata(mydata == 'A') = '1';

mydata(mydata == 'B') = '2';

mydata(mydata == 'C') = '3';

mydata(mydata == 'D') = '4';

mydata(mydata == 'E') = '5';

but this of course is not column specific. is there anyway i can isolate columns?

also, when i try to convert it back to a double with:

mydata= str2double(mydata) I get all NaN values

this does not work either:

y = sprintf('%s', mydata{:}):

x = sscanf(y,'%f');

i get the error: Expression or statement is incomplete or incorrect.

what can i do?

Thank you so much for your time and help!

Answer 1

Assuming these are all strings (which I am not sure from your description) I would just use regexprep with proper indexing:

C = {'A', 'E', 'B', 'A', 'D', 'C'; 'B', 'A', 'A', 'D', 'C', 'E'}
C(:,1:2:end) = regexprep(C(:,1:2:end),'A','5')
C(:,2:2:end) = regexprep(C(:,2:2:end),'E','5')