Reference multiple elements in a cell array

Hi all, I am unsure on the best way to reference multiple elements in a cell array. Suppose I have 4 parts and each is a cell. All parts are contained within a larger cell array as:

Part01={'Exponential' 1/lambda_A 0 age1 0};
Part02={'Exponential' 1/lambda_B 0 age2 0};
Part03={'Exponential' 1/lambda_C 0 age3 0};
Part04={'Exponential' 1/lambda_D 0 age4 0};
Parts={Part01;Part02;Part03;Part04};

Each age# value is a single number. I want to create a single vector like this:

AgeVector=[age1, age2, age3, age4]

I can do so using:

PartAgeVector=[Parts{1}{4} Parts{2}{4} Parts{3}{4} Parts{4}{4}];

This seems awfully ugly and inefficient. The number of Parts will change with each use and I want to avoid manually coding like the last line of code. How may I most efficiently create a single vector.

Thank you! A.Bellocchio

[Stephen23]

"This seems awfully ugly and inefficient"

It is. If you simply put your numeric data into a numeric array then this entire problem goes away.

[Andrew Bellocchio]

Agreed, but my part data is conveniently organized with both text and numbers. Using cell arrays is new to me. I was hoping to learn an easy way to pull data when the array has different types of cells.

Answer 1

[KSSV]

PartAgeVector = cell2mat(cellfun(@(x) x(1,4), Parts))

[Andrew Bellocchio]

Yay, this works well. Thank you, KSSV. I can also build the PartAgeVector using a for loop such as:

no_parts=length(Parts);
for part=1:no_parts
    PartAgeVector3(part)=Parts{part}{4};
end

Still, this is bulky. Is there a way to pull the data with indexing directly like we would with a pure matrix?

Answer 2

[Stephen23]

This is trivial with a comma-separated list:

>> C = {1,11,111;2,22,222;3,33,333;4,44,444}
1   11    111
2   22    222
3   33    333
4   44    444
>> [C{:,3}]
ans =
   111   222   333   444