Help splitting string using strsplit

I have a large set of data which is presented as a string, for example:

1;2;3;4;5;6;7;8 etc...

I use:

strsplit(data,';')

and that breaks everything up into individual cells.

However I have found an issue with some data. My logger is 100% reliable so sometimes I get data which looks like:

;;;;;6;7;8 etc...

Using the strsplit command I get:

NaN 6 7 8

What I'd like is

NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN 6 7 8

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

[Geoff Hayes]

Richard - from strsplit try doing the following

strsplit(data, ';', 'CollapseDelimiters', false)

so that the consecutive empty delimiters are not collapsed into one cell.

Answer 2

[madhan ravi]

str=';;;;;6;7;8';
expr=';';
C=str2double(regexp(str,expr,'split')) % edited after Jan’s comment
%[~,c]=regexp(str,expr,'match','split');
%Result=cellfun(@str2double,c)

Gives:

Result =

   NaN   NaN   NaN   NaN   NaN     6     7     8

[Jan]

+1. regexp returns the wanted cell string as 1st output when using 'split' without 'match':

C = regexp(str, expr, 'split')

and str2double works with a cellstring directly. So this is simpler and faster:

Result = str2double(regexp(str, expr, 'split'))

[madhan ravi]

Echt toll Jan! Danke schön , selbsverständlich jetzt..

Answer 3

[Richard Youden]

Thanks for the responses, greatly appreciated.

Richard