Thread Subject: Remove special characters from contents of a cell array

I have a cell array which contains string elements, but embedded in those strings are special characters (like carriage returns) that are messing up some later processing. I can't seem to get rid of them.

I have tried doing SSCANF(..., '%s%c'), which seems to get rid of some, but not all, of the special characters. Any other ideas?

I don't need to do this particularly efficiently. It is a fairly small cell array, of only 500 elements or so. Fine to do it in a slow loop.

"the cyclist" <thecyclist@gmail.com> wrote in message <hegqk1$8iu$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> I have a cell array which contains string elements, but embedded in those strings are special characters (like carriage returns) that are messing up some later processing. I can't seem to get rid of them.
>
> I have tried doing SSCANF(..., '%s%c'), which seems to get rid of some, but not all, of the special characters. Any other ideas?
>
> I don't need to do this particularly efficiently. It is a fairly small cell array, of only 500 elements or so. Fine to do it in a slow loop.

Most special characters have ascii codes that you can replace using STRREP or even REGEXPREP:

C = {'text',sprintf('WITH\tTAB')}
C = strrep(C,char(9),'_') % tab

hth
Jos

"the cyclist" <thecyclist@gmail.com> wrote in message <hegqk1$8iu$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> I have a cell array which contains string elements, but embedded in those strings are special characters (like carriage returns) that are messing up some later processing. I can't seem to get rid of them.
>
> I have tried doing SSCANF(..., '%s%c'), which seems to get rid of some, but not all, of the special characters. Any other ideas?
>
> I don't need to do this particularly efficiently. It is a fairly small cell array, of only 500 elements or so. Fine to do it in a slow loop.

One possible solution would be using regular expression (regexp). If you show small example - of you cell array it would be more clear what exactly you are want to extract.

Branko

"the cyclist" <thecyclist@gmail.com> wrote in message <hegqk1$8iu$1@fred.mathworks.com>...
> I have a cell array which contains string elements, but embedded in those strings are special characters (like carriage returns) that are messing up some later processing. I can't seem to get rid of them.
>
> I have tried doing SSCANF(..., '%s%c'), which seems to get rid of some, but not all, of the special characters. Any other ideas?
>
> I don't need to do this particularly efficiently. It is a fairly small cell array, of only 500 elements or so. Fine to do it in a slow loop.

Thanks for the replies. I was able to use ISSTRPROP with reasonable effectiveness.