get specific elements from all non-empty cells

Hello everyone!

I have a pretty simple task, but I cannot come up with a simple solution. All my ideas seem way to complicated. Here is what I want to do:

I have a cell array C containing vectors of equal length or empty cells:

C = {[1 2 3];
     [];
     [];
     [5 6 7];
     []};

Now I want to get a specific element, for example the second element, of each cell and write it into a new variable A. If the cell is empty I just want to write empty in the corresponding cell in A:

So if I wanted to get the second element I would expect A to look like this:

A = 

    [2]
    []
    []
    [6]
    []

Thanks in advance!

EDIT

Well, maybe there is not such an obvious solution for this. So I'll just stick to an 'if' and a 'for' loop.

Answer 1

[Andrei Bobrov]

A = cell(size(A));
ii = ~cellfun('isempty',C);
A(ii) = cellfun(@(x)x(2),C(ii),'un',0);

or use loop for..end

A = cell(size(C));
for jj = 1:numel(C)
    if ~isempty(C{jj})
        A{jj} = C{jj}(2);
    end
end

[Timo W]

I thought there might be a nice "one line solution". But maybe such a solution does not exist. Thanks though!