How do I delete extra values separated by comma

I have some stuff in a dataset (cell) I need removed.

Essentially my dataset looks like this:

XX

XY, XX

YZ

YY

ZZ, YY, XY

However I need only the first value of each row. I've tried with some regex but I'm still fairly inexperienced with it so it doesn't yield the results I'm aiming for.

Thanks :)

Answer 1

[Adam]

result = cellfun( @(x) x{1}, cellfun( @(x) strrep( strsplit(x), ',', '' ), myCell, 'UniformOutput', false ), 'UniformOutput', false );

works I think, but it doesn't win any prizes for neatness. You can split it over multiple lines to be a bit less daunting if you prefer.

No need for regexp though.

If your values are always just 2 letters then you can do simpler things, just accessing the first 2 elements of the cell and ignoring what comes next, but obviously that fails in the generic case.

[Sebastian]

Thanks. That did the trick! The values are poorly entered hospital codes that I'm trying to streamline. So they come in many shapes and sizes unfortunately.