How to split letters in a word into an array

Ex: In the word 'HELLO', extract the letters 'H' 'E' 'L' 'L' 'O'

Answer 1

[Jan]

The string 'Hello' consists of single characters already:

str = 'Hello';
for k = 1:length(str)
  disp(str(k))
end

So please explain the wanted type and dimensions of the output. 'H' 'E' 'L' 'L' 'O' is not clear enough.

[Ronald D Smith]

I've had a similar question a few times - my goal is take a string that represents RNA, e.g. seq = 'ATTAGCTG', and then use the individual letters as the xticklabels in a figure. cellstr(seq) would return a cell containing the entire string. I believe what I'm looking for is a cell array of individual letters (no loops would be nice). Forgive me if I'm missing something simple.

[Ronald D Smith]

Nevermind! I just noticed the transpose in the below comment. Learn something new every day.

[Stephen23]

Try num2cell, e.g. where W is your word (a 1xN character vector):

C = num2cell(W(:))

[Adam Danz]

☝ num2cell is the best solution. In case str is of class string

c = num2cell(char(str));

This works when str is a character array or a string.

Answer 2

[Tom]

str = 'HELLO';
cellstr(str')'

Answer 3

[Octa]

If you want to extract the letters, simply extract in this way

 >> str(1)

   H

 >> str(2)

   E
 >> str(3)

   L
 >>str(4)

   L
 >> str(5)

   L
 >> str(6)

   O