"The value on the right-hand side of the assignment has the wrong width." Error

Hello! I have a very large table and I am trying to change every time it says ',,7' in column 10 to change the corresponding column 9 to 'NA'. As far as I know, this following code should work

idx=station001_eus{:,10}==(',,7');
station001_eus{idx,9}='NA';

except I keep getting the error

The value on the right-hand side of the assignment
has the wrong width. The assignment requires a
value whose width is 1. 

for the second line. Any ideas how to get past this? I can't find much on it. Thank you!

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

I am not certain where the problem is in the two lines you posted.

Try this:

idx= strcmp(station001_eus{:,10}, ',,7');
station001_eus{idx,9}="NA";

The first uses strcmp to compare the strings, usually preferable to the equality test using ==. The second uses a string element (instead of a character array) for the replacement. They have properties similar to numerical elements, so might be appropriate here. (Another option, of course, might be setting it to NaN.)

I obviously can’t test this with your table, so I leave that to you to experiment with. I will help as I can if there are still problems.

[Claire Hollow]

Thank you for the suggestion! I tried it and got a different error

Invalid RHS for assignment to a categorical array.

for the second line again. Any ideas on getting past this one?

[Star Strider]

The only thing I can think of is to set it to NaN.

[Claire Hollow]

How should I alter the code to do that?

[Star Strider]

Try this:

station001_eus{idx,9}=NaN;

[Claire Hollow]

That still gave me the error

"Invalid RHS for assignment to a categorical array."

Hmmmm, I'm not sure what I could be doing wrong at this point.

[Star Strider]

Nor do I.

I rarely use categorical arrays, and I can’t guess what yours is. Perhaps defining an additional cateogry as 'NA' could do what you want.

[Claire Hollow]

Thank you so much for your help and suggestions. I'm going to continute to play around with it and see what I can find.

[Star Strider]

As always, my pleasure!