Combining cell arrays and copying to clipboard

I cannot get two cell arrays to catenate and then copy to clipboard.

%Get two cell arrays
s=get(handles.uitable1,'data');   
cname=get(handles.uitable1, 'columnname')

*%there are 3 columns, first is text, other two are floats)*
ab = cat(1, cname', (s));
str=sprintf('%s = %s\t%f\t%f\n', ab{:})
clipboard ( 'copy', str );

This is the output of ab:

       'title1'      'title2'    'title3'
      'sample1'      '0.9940'     [ 0.2370]
      'sample2'      '0.9948'     [ 0.2320]
      'sample3'      '0.9950'     [ 0.2211]

[Guillaume]

Despite your claim, according to the output you show, the second column appears to be exclusively strings (some of which represent numbers).

Secondly, I don't understand what you're trying do output with the sprintf. Maybe you're trying to print each row, but in that case why is there 4 replacement elements when you only have 3 columns. Maybe you're trying to print each column (which is what ab{:} would imply), but the %f then apply to strings.

So can you show an example of input cell and expected output string?

[Jason]

Hi. Im sorry for not being clear. I have concatenated column titles from a uitable to the data. My aim is to be able to copy to clipboard, so I can paste in other documents.

Once i have concatenated, the output i want to copy to clipboard is exactly like

        'title1'      'title2'    'title3'
        'sample1'      '0.9940'     [ 0.2370]
        'sample2'      '0.9948'     [ 0.2320]
        'sample3'      '0.9950'     [ 0.2211]

I don't care what format its copied as into clipboard.

[Jason]

just to add: I have found out that this almost works:

   str = [];
   newline = sprintf('\n');
    for i = 1:size(ab,1); 
      row = sprintf('%s\t', ab{i,:});
      row(end) = newline;
      str = [str row]; %#ok<AGROW>
    end
    str
    clipboard('copy',str);

The only undesired effect is that the last column is in exponent form which I don't want (This is what is pasted into excel)

title1  title2  title3
sample1  0.994  2.37E-01
sample2  0.9948  2.32E-01
sample3  0.995  2.21E-01

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

This works:

ab = ab'; %transpose so the values arrive in the right order for the 2nd sprintf
str = sprintf('%s\t%s\t%s\n', ab{:, 1}); %print first row exclusively as text
str = [str sprintf('%s\t%s\t%f\n', ab{:, 2:end})]

[Jason]

Thanks. After pasting into excel I get the following. Is it possible to have the same number of decimals in each. i.e. for the 0.99 in column 1 to have it written as 0.990, likewise for the 0.9948 value in column 1 to be written 0.995.

0.994  0.2433
0.99  0.6892
0.996  0.1844
0.996  0.2049
0.995  0.2201
0.994  0.2325
0.994  0.2435
0.9948  0.2363

[Guillaume]

The cropping of 0.990 to 0.99 is down to excel, there's nothing you can do in matlab about that. Excel automatically convert the text to numbers and by default does not display trailing zeros.

You can modify the cell formating in excel to always have 3 decimals. That will also take care of 0.9948.

You could round the 0.9448 in matlab, but first you'd have to transform your column of numbers as strings into proper numbers

%before transposing ab:
ab(2:end, 2) = cellfun(@str2num, ab(2:end, 2), 'UniformOutput', false)

You can then use the formatting options of sprintf:

ab = ab'; %transpose so the values arrive in the right order for the 2nd sprintf
str = sprintf('%s\t%s\t%s\n', ab{:, 1}); %print first row exclusively as text
str = [str sprintf('%s\t%1.3f\t%1.3f\n', ab{:, 2:end})]

[Jason]

Thankyou