MATLAB: Finding string in between

Question

Hi, so I have a cell string with 100 X 1 like:

18WABO1-12345-0X

18WABO2-12345-0N

18WACE3-12345-00

18WACE4-12345-0R

18WAGUG-12345-0G

18WDUER-12345-0N

I would like to find the string sequence that is always between 18W and first – so the result is:

ABO1

AB02

ACE3

ACE4

AGUG

DUER etc

my example of a code:

 %
somestring(:)= eic_p; 
underscore_indices= strfind(somestring,'18W');
underscore_indices=cell2mat(underscore_indices);
fs_indices = strfind(somestring,'-');
fs_indices=fs_indices';
your_number=cellfun(@(v)v(1),fs_indices);
somestring(:)= somestring'; 
for i=1:length(fs_indices)
    yourNumber= somestring{i}(underscore_indices(i)+2:your_number(i)-1);
    %HOW i can save every iteration? thanks
end

in the last for loop somehow I am getting the weird output and can not save all results so I can have all those 205 abbreviations in one variable (yourNumber).

Thanks a lot,

Answer 1

yourNumber is overwritten in the loop and only the last value is saved. The first step to fix your code is

yourNumber = cell( length(fs_indices), 1 );
for i = 1 : length(fs_indices)
    yourNumber{i} = somestring{i}(underscore_indices(i)+2:your_number(i)-1);
end

There are other ways, e.g. with regular expressions

>> str = '18WABO1-12345-0X';
>> regexp( str, '(?<=18W)[^\-]+(?=\-)', 'match' )
ans = 
    'ABO1'

and

    cac = { 
            '18WABO1-12345-0X'
            '18WABO2-12345-0N'
            '18WACE3-12345-00'
            '18WACE4-12345-0R'
            '18WAGUG-12345-0G'
            '18WDUER-12345-0N' };
    %    
    out = regexp( cac, '(?<=18W).+?(?=\-)', 'match' ); 
    out = cat( 1, out{:} );

and

>> out
out = 
    'ABO1'
    'ABO2'
    'ACE3'
    'ACE4'
    'AGUG'
    'DUER'

and with indexing

>> str = char( cac );
>> str = str( :, 4:7 )
str =
ABO1
ABO2
ACE3
ACE4
AGUG
DUER
>>