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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,

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:


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