Chars with white space

Using xmlread() I found that MatLab adds a lot of white space into the project for whatever reason. But I get values when I read some node of a cell array with a char in it with the value of ' '. The value varies with blank characters. When I read my xml file out it looks like:

Test

TestVar

boolean

32

So when I try to populate my struct I get a lot of blank values added in. I tried to use isempty() but since the cell array has a value of a char 1x4 of blank characters it thinks something in there. Is there something I can use to check is a char has characters present in it? That way I can skip the write to my struct?

Answer 1

[Jan]

a = deblank(a);
a(cellfun('isempty', a)) = [];

Answer 2

[Honglei Chen]

You can try deblank

http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/deblank.html

[Honglei Chen]

Hi Lucas, I could be wrong, but after you use deblank, you should be able to remove empty cells

a = {'Test',' '}

a = cellfun(@deblank,a,'UniformOutput',false)

a(~isempty(a))

Note that in the original definition of a, you can put in multiple spaces. Somehow it does not show multiple spaces in comment.