deleting all rows from a table that contain a string

I have the following table T:

    LastName     Age    Smoker    Height    Weight    BloodPressure
    _________    ___    ______    ______    ______    _____________

    empty        empty   empty      empty    empty     empty 
    'Sanchez'    38     true        71       176       124     93  
    empty        empty   empty      empty    empty     empty 
    'Johnson'    43     false       69       163       109     77  
    empty        empty   empty      empty    empty     empty 
    'Li'         38     true        64       131       125     83 
    empty        empty   empty      empty    empty     empty 
    'Diaz'       40     false       67       133       117     75 
    empty        empty   empty      empty    empty     empty 
    'Brown'      49     true        64       119       122     80  
    empty        empty   empty      empty    empty     empty 
    

I want to remove all the rows that contain the string 'empty'. I've searched but the examples I found was to search on a particular column but I want to search on all columns.

     T(cellfun(@isempty, strfind(T.columnName, 'empty')), :);

Answer 1

[madhan ravi]

T(~all(strcmp(T{:,:},'empty'),2),:)

[Eth]

Thanks!

[Eth]

Is there a way to delete the entire row if one instance of the string 'empty' is found? For example:

LastName     Age    Smoker    Height    Weight    BloodPressure
    _________    ___    ______    ______    ______    _____________
    empty        empty   empty      empty    empty     empty 
    'Sanchez'    38     true        71       176       124     93  
    one          two    three      four    empty     rose 
    'Johnson'    43     false       69       163       109     77
     empty        empty   empty      empty    empty     empty 
    'Diaz'       40     false       67       133       117     75
    
    

Output (the top row deleted but also the 3rd row where the Weight column has the string 'empty':

    LastName     Age    Smoker    Height    Weight    BloodPressure
    _________    ___    ______    ______    ______    _____________
    'Sanchez'    38     true        71       176       124     93 
    'Johnson'    43     false       69       163       109     77
    'Diaz'       40     false       67       133       117     75

[madhan ravi]

Use any() instead of all()

[Eth]

Thanks! worked perfectly.

Answer 2

[Peter Perkins]

Eth, I think the more important question is how you got yourself into this corner to begin with. You say you have a table, But it looks more like you have a cell array. Probably you have a table all of whose variables are cell columns. Given that you have both text, logical, and numeric data, that's not a good position to be in. However you got there has made things much harder than they need to be.

This is the table you want:

>> t
t =
  11×6 table
    LastName     Age      Smoker       Height    Weight    BloodPressure
    _________    ___    ___________    ______    ______    _____________
    <missing>    NaN    <undefined>     NaN       NaN       NaN    NaN  
    "Sanchez"     38    true             71       176       124     93  
    <missing>    NaN    <undefined>     NaN       NaN       NaN    NaN  
    "Johnson"     43    false            69       163       109     77  
    <missing>    NaN    <undefined>     NaN       NaN       NaN    NaN  
    "Li"          38    true             64       131       125     83  
    <missing>    NaN    <undefined>     NaN       NaN       NaN    NaN  
    "Diaz"        40    false            67       133       117     75  
    <missing>    NaN    <undefined>     NaN       NaN       NaN    NaN  
    "Brown"       49    true             64       119       122     80  
    <missing>    NaN    <undefined>     NaN       NaN       NaN    NaN  

At that point, rmmissing or fillmissing are simple one-liners to clean up your data.

[Eth]

Hi Peter,

I'm pretty new to MATLAB programming as you can tell. I've created an app in appdesigner with a table (8 columns by n rows) and I'm reading a formatted text file into the table but I need the ability to modify the rows that were read from the text file and also the ability to add new rows (and these new rows need to be editable) before and after the rows that are already there and also delete any unwanted row and once this is all done I need to overewrite the modified text file. I have it working now but it's probably not the best approach.