MATLAB: How to feed one string to array on NaN

Question

Dear MATLABERs 🙂

Is it possible to add a string to an array of NaN The next example does not work N = NaN(10,1); N(5,1)='Stop'; the result should be a column of NaN but the fifth element is Stop.

Thanks Aziz

Answer 1

No. NaN is numeric, but 'Stop' is a character string. It is not possible to have numbers and characters in the same array.

You could use one of the following:

%cell array of mostly numeric
N = num2cell( NaN(10,1) );
N{5} = 'Stop';

or

%cell array of char vectors
N = cellstr( num2str( NaN(10,1) ) );
N{5} = 'Stop';

or, if you have R2016b or later,

%array of string data type
N = string(num2str(NaN(10,1)));
N(5) = 'Stop';