How to assign values to cell array of characters (e.g., LeftArrowKey = 1)

I am trying to use a for loop to go through a cell array of character data that denote which key was pressed (LeftArrow, RightArrow) and change the LeftArrow cells to 0 and the RightArrow cells to 1. However, when I use the code below, the new matrix is larger in length than the original.

for item = 1 : length(OT1response_1)

    if strcmp(OT1response_1{item},'RightArrow')
        responses(item) = 1;
    else
        responses(item) = 0;
    end
    OT1converted_1 = (responses)
end

Answer 1

[BhaTTa]

Hey @James Crum, I assume that ' OT1response_1' might have other keystroke entries other than 'LeftArrow' and 'RightArrow' this might be the possible reason for unintended behaviour, you can use the below corrected code to handle this edge case:

% Assuming OT1response_1 is your cell array of strings
OT1response_1 = {'LeftArrow', 'RightArrow', 'LeftArrow', 'RightArrow'}; % Example data

% Initialize the responses array with zeros
responses = zeros(1, length(OT1response_1));

% Loop through each element in the cell array
for item = 1:length(OT1response_1)
    if strcmp(OT1response_1{item}, 'RightArrow')
        responses(item) = 1;
    elseif strcmp(OT1response_1{item}, 'LeftArrow')
        responses(item) = 0;
    else
        error('Unexpected value in OT1response_1');
    end
end

% Assign the converted responses to OT1converted_1
OT1converted_1 = responses;

% Display the result
disp(OT1converted_1);

     0     1     0     1