MATLAB: Regexrep for the neophyte

currencyregexprep

How to write expression to find and convert financial strings written with comma separator to be able to parse numerically?
Example stirng is something like:
recipients={'John Doe $200, Freddy Flint $132.40 SP19; Mary Lamb $1,423.00-SP19, Joe Blow $1,200'};
which is a list of student scholarship awards entered, unfortunately, free-style in a remarks field in an Excel spreadsheet. I need to parse by student and extract each.
I managed to find/return the location/token of the amounts containing the punctuation, but I'm illiterate with regexp and haven't figured out how to locate the comma then within that substring to remove it.
K>> regexp(recipients,'([$]\d+[,]\d+)','match')
ans =
  1×1 cell array
    {1×2 cell}
K>> ans{:}
ans =
  1×2 cell array
    {'$1,423'}    {'$1,200'}
K>>
As can be seen, the original text also has "issues" in that the separator between students isn't consistent–it may be a comma or semicolon, not sure what else I'll find as I progress.
For context, this is the next step past the previous Q? of piecing back together disparate databases/spreadsheets…now that I can compare the award to the billing by account, I can find coding or other errors–but need to be able compare the details.

Best Answer

match = regexp(recipients,'(?<name>[a-zA-Z]+(?:\s*[a-zA-Z]+)*)\s?\$?(?<sum>\d+(?:[\.,]\d+)*)[^\w,;]*(?<time>[a-zA-Z]+\d+)?','names');
Will return a struct array with like that:
ans = 1x4 struct array with fields:
    name % recipient name
    sum  % scholarship amount
    time % time string
Time is not mandatory so it can be an empty char vector
sum is convertible to numbers using str2double even though it contains the commas
If you want clarifications for the regex pattern I'll gladly add them
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