importing an empty text column rather than a number column

Hello,

I have a excel spreadsheet with 12 columns that I imported into MATLAB using readtable. The issue is there are two text columns which could sometimes be empty and sometimes not. Whenever its empty and i run the code MATLAB imports the table and replaces the empty cells with NAN showing its not a text column but i want it to be replaces with single qoutes (' ') instead because it is a text column.

[Stijn Haenen]

Use the num2str command and change every NaN to ' ':

Data=num2str(Data);
Data(Data=='NaN')=' ';

[Afolabi Fashola]

So is Data the name of the variable that stores my table?

Answer 1

[J. Alex Lee]

Are you already using something like detectImportOptions() or spreadsheetImportOptions()? If not, look at that

And then look at setVarType().

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.io.text.delimitedtextimportoptions.setvartype.html

[Afolabi Fashola]

detectImportOptions() worked. Thank you.