How to convert a string of characters to numbers?

I have the following string obtained from a text file (the text file has a lot of info so I had to go and look for certain lines):

0        0        0        0       0.1   0  0   0 BlaBla

Another line might look like this

1    0.013   0.0156   -0.104  0.0376  0.0624  0.132  0.132 BlaBlaBla

By the way I'm reading the file everything is now a string of characters.

How can I convert that to a vector? Notice that the last column is a string of characters. The white spaces on the first line is different than on the second one too.

Any help is appreciated thanks.

Answer 1

[Matt Fig]

str = '1 0.013 0.0156 -0.104  0.0376 0.0624 0.132  0.132 Bla';
T = regexp(str,'-*\d*\.*\d*','match');
V = cellfun(@str2double,T)

[Matt Fig]

carlos Uribe comments:

"Thanks Matt that works when I have just one string...

Now my problem is that I have a cell of those strings (cell).

T = regexp(cell,'-*\d*\.*\d*','match');

works fine and gives me a cell T with many cells

V = cellfun(@str2double,T)

gives me a problem because I cannot input a cell there...

Any workarounds for this?"

[Matt Fig]

Yes, just do the same for each element of T.

str = {'1 0.013 0.0156  -0.104 0.0376 0.0624 0.132 0.132 Bla'};
str(2) = {'22  0 3  0 0.1   0  0   0 BlaBla'};
T = regexp(str,'-*\d*\.*\d*','match');
V = cellfun(@str2double,T,'Un',0);
V{1}
V{2}

[carlos Uribe]

I was just trying to figure out if there was kind of a "vectorized" way of doing it...given that right now I have 10^8 of those strings.

[Matt Fig]

You mean more vectorized than I showed above? How could it be more vectorized than what I showed above, since there are no MATLAB loops?

[Jan]

V = str2double(T); % Without CELLFUN

[carlos Uribe]

My bad..didn't see that you added two new values to cellfun...thanks for your help

[Matt Fig]

Jan, that returns nans here...

Answer 2

[Jan]

str = '1 0.013 0.0156 -0.104  0.0376 0.0624 0.132  0.132 Bla';
V = sscanf(str, '%g', 6);

[Matt Fig]

Or for cell str:

V = cellfun(@(x) sscanf(x, '%g'),str,'Un',0);

Very nice... no call to REGEXP.