Conversion of Categorical to char while maintaining same dimension

I have a variable having dimension m-by-3. It's datatype is categorical. I am trying to convert it to char datatype while maintaining the same dimension of m-by-3.

Can someone tell me how to convert a variable of categorical datatype of dimension m-by-3 to the char datatype of dimension m-by-3?

Answer 1

[Voss]

You cannot do that in general.

In the special case that all the categories are a single character long, then you can do it:

m = 4;
% creating a random m-by-3 categorical array
C = categorical(num2cell(char(64+randi(26,[m 3]))))

C = 4×3 categorical array
     T      Z      H 
     G      X      W 
     P      N      R 
     X      Y      Y 

% converting C to an m-by-3 char
reshape(char(C),m,[])

ans = 4×3 char array
    'TZH'
    'GXW'
    'PNR'
    'XYY'

But if any of the categories is more than one character, that's not going to work because you have more than 3*m characters in total.

Instead, convert to a string array:

string(C) % m-by-3 string array

ans = 4×3 string array
    "T"    "Z"    "H"
    "G"    "X"    "W"
    "P"    "N"    "R"
    "X"    "Y"    "Y"

Or a cell array of character vectors:

cellstr(C) % m-by-3 cell array

ans = 4×3 cell array
    {'T'}    {'Z'}    {'H'}
    {'G'}    {'X'}    {'W'}
    {'P'}    {'N'}    {'R'}
    {'X'}    {'Y'}    {'Y'}

[NAVNEET NAYAN]

Very well explained. Thank You So Much.

[Voss]

You're welcome!