Cell Array of Strings Indexing and Relabeling to Numeric Values?

Hi all,

I have a cell array of strings that mark certain sites (example: 'Townsville - Crossroad Station (1234)'). I have 27 different sites in total.

What I need help with is, this is a column in a table with other data and I wanted to change the strings to numbers.

Something like this:

if site(i) == 'Townsville - Crossroads Station (1234)'
     site(i) = 0;
if site(i) == 'City Colonies - Fork in Road (5678)'
     site(i) = 1;
.
.
.
else
     site(i) = 26;

I want this so I can then make subset matrices of values from the table filtered by the condition without typing a huge string each time. I could also then treat it as categorical data as a factor more easily.

Or, if it's possible to do this, if there is a way to loop through and set a string = number (like above) but index the number it sets each time the string is different, that would be great too.

The main components of the table I'm evaluating are: datetimes, site, day of week

right now and I want to section off by site first.

Any help would be great, thank you!

Answer 1

[dpb]

This is perfect use for categorical variable...and to use a |table instead of cell array for the data structure. Life will be much easier then... :)

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/categorical.html

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/readtable.html

Attach a .mat file with your input file and someone here can (and probably will) get you quite a ways along very quickly...