having problem with sttrep function and empty matrix..

I want to make the results like this:

>>phraseblanks

phrasemat = Hello and how are you?

Hi there everyone!

How is it going?

WHazzup?

Phrase 1 had 4 blanks

Phrase 2 had 3 blanks

Phrase 3 had 2 blanks

Phrase 4 had 0 blanks

New phrasemat is :

Hello&and&how&are&you?

Hi&there&everyone!

How&is&it&going?

WHazzup?

----------------------------------- so I made script

"phraseblanks.m"

phrasemat = char('Hello and how are you?', ... 'Hi there everyone!', 'How is it going?', 'WHazzup?')

[r, c] = size(phrasemat);

for i = 1:r

    phrasemat_new = cell(r,c);

    howmany = countblanks(phrasemat(i,:));

    fprintf('Phrase %d had %d blanks\n',i,howmany);

    phrasemat(j,:)=strrep(phrasemat(i,:),' ','&')

    phrasemat_new{i,:} = [phrasemat(i,:)];

end

fprintf('Changing one is %s\n',eval('phrasemat_new'));

-------------------------- script "countblanks.m"

function num = countblanks(phrase)

% countblanks returns the # of blanks in a trimmed string

% Format: countblanks(string)

num = length(strfind(strtrim(phrase), ' '));

end -----------------------------------

and I keep having errors.

please help me..

Answer 1

[Jos (10584)]

You are better off storing the phrases in a cell array of chars, as these phrases can have different lengths.

phrasemat = {'Hello and how are you?', 'Hi there everyone!', 'How is it going?', 'WHazzup?'}

Now you can define a function that operates on a string and counts the number of spaces.

CountSpaces = @(str) sum(str==' ') ;
Countspaces('Hello world, my name is Hyunmin!') % will return 5

which you can easily apply to all sentences in your cell array using CELLFUN:

Nspaces = cellfun(CountSpaces, phrasemat)

[Jos (10584)]

And if you want to replace the spaces with something else, create a new function

ReplaceSpacesFunction = @(str) strrep(str, ' ', '#')
NewPhrases = cellfun(ReplaceSpacesFunction, phrasemat, 'UniformOutput', false)