if i have a string say 'ec john nick' .how to delete ec and retain 'john nick'?

.

Answer 1

[John D'Errico]

Not at all clear what you REALLY want to do here.

If all you want to do is to remove the first "word" from the string, then find the first occurrence of a space after a character. Then delete all up to that point. Any of these will help you out:

help regexp
help strfind
help find

I recommend regexp as the best way though.

If your question is to remove the explicit character string 'ec', then strfind will again help you, as will regexp.

If you wish to find the words 'john nick' and retain only that part, then again regexp, strfind will solve it.

As far as deleting part of a string, a string is just like any vector. You delete elements like this:

A = rand(1,10);
A(1:3) = [];

So that deleted the first three elements of A.

[rashmi am]

i have data (list of names)read from excel, and i want to compare only the middle and the last name.So, wanted to delete the first name and compare the strings.

[rashmi am]

thank you.

[John D'Errico]

Ok. so then use regexp to find the first occurrence of a character, followed by a space. Then delete everything up to that point. Or keep everything after that point, which is equivalent.

[Image Analyst]

If all the person's names are in a single string, then you can split it up with John's handy "allwords" utility: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/27184-allwords to split the name up into first, middle, and last name, and then use strcmpi() to compare the strings you want to compare..