Programming |
Searching and Replacing
MATLAB provides several functions for searching and replacing characters in a string. (MATLAB also supports search and replace operations using regular expressions. See Regular Expressions.)
Consider a string named label
:
The
strrep
function performs the standard search-and-replace operation. Use strrep
to change the date from '10/28'
to '10/30'
:
findstr
returns the starting position of a substring within a longer string. To find all occurrences of the string 'amp'
inside label
, use
The position within label
where the only occurrence of 'amp'
begins is the second character.
The strtok
function returns the characters before the first occurrence of a delimiting character in an input string. The default delimiting characters are the set of white-space characters. You can use the strtok
function to parse a sentence into words. For example,
function allWords = words(inputString) remainder = inputString; allWords = ''; while (any(remainder)) [chopped,remainder] = strtok(remainder); allWords = strvcat(allWords, chopped); end
The strmatch
function looks through the rows of a character array or cell array of strings to find strings that begin with a given series of characters. It returns the indices of the rows that begin with these characters:
maxstrings = strvcat('max', 'minimax', 'maximum') maxstrings = max minimax maximum strmatch('max', maxstrings) ans = 1 3
String Comparisons | Converting from Numeric to String |
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