MATLAB: How to count and save twitter hashtags

cell arraycounthashtags

I am writing a script that analyzes the hashtags from tweets that I saved in a text file. So far I managed to count the amount of hashtags in the file:
fid = fopen('Tweets.txt');
numberOfTweets = 0;
while i ~= -1
i = fgetl(fid);
numberOfTweets = numberOfTweets + 1;
end
numberOfTweets = numberOfTweets - 1;
frewind(fid)
for i = 1:numberOfTweets
twitterStuff{i} = fgetl(fid);
end
numberOfHash = 0;
for i = 1:numberOfTweets
if(strfind(twitterStuff{i}, '#') ~=0);
c = strfind(twitterStuff{i}, '#');
[rowHash columnHash] = size(c);
numberOfHash = numberOfHash + columnHash;
end
end
Now, I want to find out what the specific hashtags are and save them into a cell array, but I don't really know how to do that.

Best Answer

You should use regular expressions for that, you can do pretty much anything with them. This should do what you want to, and if not, then it should point you in the right direction:
s = '#Matlab#2012b rocks my #sox # off!'
% Match a '#' with zero or more characters that aren't whitespace or '#' after it
T = regexp(s,'(#[^ #]*)','tokens')
T{:}
% Match a '#' with 1 or more characters that aren't whitespace or '#' after it
T = regexp(s,'(#[^ #]+)','tokens')
T{:}
% Match a '#' with 1 or more characters that aren't whitespace or '#' after
% it, but don't capture the '#'
T = regexp(s,'#([^ #]+)','tokens')
T{:}