Cell 'Find And Replace'

Finds all occurrences of NaN in a cell array and replaces them.

Description

cellData=cellNaNReplace (cellData, replaceWith)

Accepts a cell array and a char/integer and replaces all occurrences of NaN in that cell array with the 'replaceWith' value. This is especially useful when using 'readfromexcel' or other excel importers since they sometimes put NaN instead of empty cells.

Example of usage:
a = num2cell([0 1 2 NaN 4]);
b = cellNaNReplace (a,'');

or, if you're dealing with excel spreadsheets, you can use:

Data = readfromexcel(File,'All');
Data = cellNaNReplace (Data,0);

Enjoy.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the following in the creation of this submission:
readfromexcel

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.1.0 (R14SP3)

[Sebastian Walderich]

Hi Yoav,

Good job, thanks for that! But maybe some annotations ;-)
For cell-arrays including numbers only, you can simply do something like this:
a = {1 2 NaN; 3 NaN 4; NaN 5 6};
a(isnan([a{:}])) = {-1}

Your script doesn't handle cell-arrays within cell-arrays, so I simplfied it to this:

--
function cellData = cellNaNReplace (cellData, replaceWith)
    if nargin ~= 2
        error(['function cellNaNReplace does not take ' nargin ' arguments']);
    elseif ~iscell(cellData)
        error(['first argument must be a cell array']);
    end

    cellData = cellfun(@cellrep, cellData, 'UniformOutput', false);

    function value = cellrep(num)
        if ~iscell(num) & isnan(num)
            value = replaceWith; % the replaced value
        else
            value = num; % the original number back.
        end
    end
end
--

There's no need for your parameter-trick. Nested subfunctions can see their parents variables.

Again, thanks for the script!

[Arya Bolurfrushan]

Hello,

This is a great function but I get into this error constantly "??? Incorrect number of inputs.
On line 57 ==> cellData = cellfun(@cellrep, cellData, 'UniformOutput', false);"

Please help

[fan houjun]

thanks