take second element of cell

Dear all, I have 500 cell this is part of it, a={[1,5] [2,36,74,56,73,5] [3,79,73,5] [4,74,56,73,5] [5] [6,12,5] [7,3,79,73,5] [8,25,97,69,61,3,79,73,5]}; I just want to take the second element from each cell and put it in spreat it array like:

b=[5 36 79 74 0 12 3 25];

Thanks...

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

Here's one way. I needed to make the temporary variable to accommodate the way you are handling the cell array element whose vector is length 1.

tmp = cellfun(@(x)[x 0],a,'UniformOutput',false);
b = cellfun(@(x)x(2),tmp)
clear tmp

[skysky2000]

That's amazing.... Thanks a lot mate!

[Image Analyst]

Amazing yes. For anyone finding it a bit cryptic, here's a explicit, brute force method using a for loop -- maybe not as efficient for long arrays, or MATLAB-ish, but possibly more intuitive and understandable for some readers:

a={[1,5] [2,36,74,56,73,5] [3,79,73,5] [4,74,56,73,5] [5] [6,12,5] [7,3,79,73,5] [8,25,97,69,61,3,79,73,5]}
for k = 1 : length(a)
  thisCellContents = a{k};
  if length(thisCellContents) > 1
    % Normal case
    b(k) = thisCellContents(2);
  else
    % Only one element in the vector so assign it 0
    b(k) = 0;
  end
end