count nonblank values

Hi, Can anyone tell me how to count nonblank values in an array? I want to find something like:

if number of nonblank values in A > 5 do something

else move on to next record

Thanks Patrick

Answer 1

[Andrew Newell]

By blank, do you mean blank characters in a string S? If so, you could do this to count the nonblank characters:

num_nonblank = sum(S~=' ');

Or, if S is a cell array of strings,

num_nonblank = sum(~strcmp(S(:),''));

[Patrick]

Sorry ,I sould have said string. Thanks, your answer works. Patrick

Answer 2

[Jan]

If "blanks" means all white space characters like spaces, line breaks, tabs, formfeeds etc:

num_non_blank = sum(~isspace(S));

Equivalent:

num_non_blank = sum(S <= char(32));

The ASCII-code of all control characters and the space are lower than 33. I'm not sure about the effects of multi-byte characters, e.g. Unicode file names.

[David]

Isn't there an easy way to get the lengths of non-blank parts of character vectors placed into an array like this:

A = char('Small', 'Medium', 'Very Large')

The answer I'd like is: 5 6 10. I want a one or two-line solution that returns a vector with the lengths of the non-blank parts of each character string in the matrix but counts blanks that fall WITHIN the character string [between words.] In the above case, the matrix A would be 3x10 but I want a function that ignores only the blanks padded onto the end of each string when the matrix is formed and I can't always get the length of the vectors before they're place in the matrix.

David Horton