- It is possible to convert the letters to their character codes and store those in a numeric array (but this does not seem to be what you are after).
- It is possible to store words (i.e. character vectors) in a cell array.
- You can easily use a lookup table with some indices.
Replace zeros with text
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How could somebody replace zeros in a matrix or vector with a word?
For example, I'm trying to make a column n rows long that says the word 'hello'. How could I do that?
a = zeros(10,1)
a(a==0) = 'hello'
3 Comments
Jan
on 22 Feb 2018
@Dylan: The question might sound easy if you are not familiar with programming. For an experiences programmer zeros and strings are such completely different things, that it is hard to imagine, why you want to do this. A metaphor: Imagine you have a hand full of eggs and want to replace the eggs by sunsets. Hm.
Numbers (as zeros) are numbers and you cannot "replace" them by strings. Note that a single 0 inside a vector is one element of type double, while 'hello' is a vector of 5 elements of type char.
I will later then compare that vector to others for
true/false outputs
This sounds even more strange.
Is there a way to create a cell array that is n rows long
that contains 'hello' in each row?
Yes, this is clear. See Stephen's answer.
Answers (2)
James Tursa
on 21 Feb 2018
"... I'm trying to make a column n rows long that says the word 'hello' ..."
a = ('hello')';
The above results in a column vector that says 'hello'. Not sure what your real goal is.
4 Comments
James Tursa
on 21 Feb 2018
Edited: James Tursa
on 21 Feb 2018
When you used n=11 above, I count a column of 11 rows in the output exactly as your wording requested. If you mean 11 rows of 'hello' stacked vertically, then just
a = repmat('hello',11,1);
Also, replacing char class elements into a double class variable will turn the char values into double values (the ASCII number of the character). It is not clear to me what you want for an output in this case. You can't have char class data stored inside a double class matrix. E.g.,
>> a = zeros(1,10)
a =
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
>> a(1:5) = 'hello'
a =
104 101 108 108 111 0 0 0 0 0
The char data simply gets converted to a double value ASCII equivalent.
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