Merge elements of a row into a single element array

Hi,

I want to merge each row of CHAR type matrix

BB=[C I M G 2 8 3 0; C I M G 2 8 3 2; C I M G 2 8 3 3; C I M G 2 8 3 4]

as

BBB=[CIMG2830; CIMG2832; CIMG2833; CIMG2834]

or in other words I want to merge each row into one single element, not necessarily all elements are numbers.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

BB=['C' 'I' 'M' 'G' '2' '8' '3' '0'; 'C' 'I' 'M' 'G' '2' '8' '3' '2'; 'C' 'I' 'M' 'G' '2' '8' '3' '3'; 'C' 'I' 'M' 'G' '2' '8' '3' '4']

is already completely equivalent to

BBB = ['CIMG2830'; 'CIMG2832'; 'CIMG2833'; 'CIMG2834']

Are you sure you are starting with a char matrix? And not, perhaps, a cell array whose elements are each single char ? If what you have is

 BB={'C' 'I' 'M' 'G' '2' '8' '3' '0'; 'C' 'I' 'M' 'G' '2' '8' '3' '2'; 'C' 'I' 'M' 'G' '2' '8' '3' '3'; 'C' 'I' 'M' 'G' '2' '8' '3' '4'}

then

BBB = reshape( horzcat(BB{:}), size(BB,1), [])

[JohnDylon]

MATLAB says they are type CHAR. Padding them manually is trivial, I'm looking for a generic way that I can apply to any random CHAR array that another time I shouldn't have to write them manually but with the help of a piece of code.

How I get this CHAR array is as follows.

I get directory list of a specific place in PC via

AA=dir(folder);

I extract name list from struct AA

aa={AA.name};

Now I have a CELL array of

aa=
{'CIMG2830'  'CIMG2832'  'CIMG2833'  'CIMG2834'  'DSC_0006'  'DSC_0007'  'DSC_0008'  'DSC_0010'  'SAM_0002'  'SAM_0003'  'SAM_0004'  'SAM_0005'  'SS856007'  'SS856008'  'SS856009'}

When I use cell2mat(aa') and so I have a CHAR type 15x8 array of

[C I M G 2 8 3 0;
C I M G 2 8 3 2;
C I M G 2 8 3 3;
C I M G  2 8 3 4;
.....
S S 8 5 6 0 0 9;]

Since I need a 15x1 array of

[CIMG2830;
CIMG2832;
CIMG2833;
CIMG2834;
.....
SS856009;]

where each entry is a folder name at somewhere in PC.

So I'm looking for a way to get proper names of folders.

[Walter Roberson]

Do not use cell2mat() for that purpose. Instead, use

char(aa)

as that will convert the cell array of strings into a row-based array of char.

However, you would seldom need that. You would typically instead use something like,

filename = aa{k};
fullname = fullfile(folder, filename);

[JohnDylon]

That worked great for me. Thank you for pointing a torch on this.