Get lengths of nonuniform-length character strings in an array without counting padded blanks

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'd like a one or two-line solution if possible 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 placed in the matrix.

David Horton

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

out=cellfun(@numel,cellstr(A))

[David]

Thank you so much. This works. I did play around with cellfun and arrayfun but I somehow didn't figure out I should use the conversion function (cellstr). I had a mental block that kept saying "you don't want to convert to a cell array." Of course this way I don't have to save the array after converting .....

Thanks - being able to use this site and the file-sharing site make MATLAB life SO much easier.

David

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

You can also use arrayfun:

out=arrayfun(@(x) numel(strtrim(A(x,:))),1:size(A,1))

% look at strtrim function

doc strtrim

[David]

Thanks again - very informative.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

cellfun(@(S) find(S~=' ',1,'last'), A)

[David]

Thanks but this doesn't work on a character array and I have tried arrayfun, which functions similarly to cellfun. Perhaps using arrayfun is a solution but I haven't figured out yet HOW to us it appropriately.

Thanks for your help anyway.