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Stephen23
Last activity on 12 Apr 2024

TUTORIAL: Comma-Separated Lists and How to Use Them

Introduction

Comma-separated lists are really very simple. You use them all the time. Here is one:

a,b,c,d

That is a comma-separated list containing four variables, the variables a, b, c, and d. Every time you write a list separated by commas then you are writing a comma-separated list. Most commonly you would write a comma-separated list as inputs when calling a function:

fun(a,b,c,d)

or as arguments to the concatenation operator or cell construction operator:

[a,b,c,d]
{a,b,c,d}

or as function outputs:

[a,b,c,d] = fun();

It is very important to understand that in general a comma-separated list is NOT one variable (but it could be). However, sometimes it is useful to create a comma-separated list from one variable (or define one variable from a comma-separated list), and MATLAB has several ways of doing this from various container array types:

1) from a field of a structure array using dot-indexing:

struct_array.field        % all elements
struct_array(idx).field   % selected elements

2) from a cell array using curly-braces:

cell_array{:}             % all elements
cell_array{idx}           % selected elements

3) from a string array using curly-braces:

string_array{:}           % all elements
string_array{idx}         % selected elements

Note that in all cases, the comma-separated list consists of the content of the container array, not subsets (or "slices") of the container array itself (use parentheses to "slice" any array). In other words, they will be equivalent to writing this comma-separated list of the container array content:

content1, content2, content3, .. , contentN

and will return as many content arrays as the original container array has elements (or that you select using indexing, in the requested order). A comma-separated list of one element is just one array, but in general there can be any number of separate arrays in the comma-separated list (zero, one, two, three, four, or more). Here is an example showing that a comma-separated list generated from the content of a cell array is the same as a comma-separated list written explicitly:

>> C = {1,0,Inf};
>> C{:}
ans =
     1
ans =
     0
ans =
   Inf
>> 1,0,Inf
ans =
     1
ans =
     0
ans =
   Inf

How to Use Comma-Separated Lists

Function Inputs: Remember that every time you call a function with multiple input arguments you are using a comma-separated list:

fun(a,b,c,d)

and this is exactly why they are useful: because you can specify the arguments for a function or operator without knowing anything about the arguments (even how many there are). Using the example cell array from above:

>> vertcat(C{:})
ans =
    1
    0
  Inf

which, as we should know by now, is exactly equivalent to writing the same comma-separated list directly into the function call:

>> vertcat(1,0,Inf)
ans =
    1
    0
  Inf

How can we use this? Commonly these are used to generate vectors of values from a structure or cell array, e.g. to concatenate the filenames which are in the output structure of dir:

S = dir(..);
F = {S.name}

which is simply equivalent to

F = {S(1).name, S(2).name, S(3).name, .. , S(end).name}

Or, consider a function with multiple optional input arguments:

opt = {'HeaderLines',2, 'Delimiter',',', 'CollectOutputs',true);
fid = fopen(..);
C = textscan(fid,'%f%f',opt{:});
fclose(fid);

Note how we can pass the optional arguments as a comma-separated list. Remember how a comma-separated list is equivalent to writing var1,var2,var3,..., then the above example is really just this:

C = textscan(fid,'%f%f', 'HeaderLines',2, 'Delimiter',',', 'CollectOutputs',true)

with the added advantage that we can specify all of the optional arguments elsewhere and handle them as one cell array (e.g. as a function input, or at the top of the file). Or we could select which options we want simply by using indexing on that cell array. Note that varargin and varargout can also be useful here.

Function Outputs: In much the same way that the input arguments can be specified, so can an arbitrary number of output arguments. This is commonly used for functions which return a variable number of output arguments, specifically ind2sub and gradient and ndgrid. For example we can easily get all outputs of ndgrid, for any number of inputs (in this example three inputs and three outputs, determined by the number of elements in the cell array):

C = {1:3,4:7,8:9};
[C{:}] = ndgrid(C{:});

which is thus equivalent to:

[C{1},C{2},C{3}] = ndgrid(C{1},C{2},C{3});

Further Topics:

MATLAB documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/comma-separated-lists.html

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/access-multiple-elements-of-a-nonscalar-struct-array.html

https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/matlab-tips-and-tricks-exploiting-the-comma-separated-list-vectorizing-cell-array-and-structure-references.html

Click on these links to jump to relevant comments below:

Dynamic Indexing (indexing into arrays with arbitrary numbers of dimensions)

Nested Structures (why you get an error trying to index into a comma-separated list)

Summary

Just remember that in general a comma-separated list is not one variable (although they can be), and that they are exactly what they say: a list (of arrays) separated with commas. You use them all the time without even realizing it, every time you write this:

fun(a,b,c,d)

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Highlights

Adam Danz
Last activity on 15 Jan 2023

New in R2021a: Capture disp() output as a string

We've all been there. You've got some kind of output that displays perfectly in the command window and you just want to capture that display as a string so you can use it again somewhere else. Maybe it's a multidimensional array, a table, a structure, or a fit object that perfectly displays the information you need in a neat and tidy format but when you try to recreate the display in a string variable it's like reconstructing the Taj Mahal out of legos.

Enter Matlab r2021a > formattedDisplayText()

Use str=formattedDisplayText(var) the same way you use disp(var) except instead of displaying the output, it's stored as a string as it would appear in the command window.

Additional name-value pairs allow you to

Specify a numeric format
Specify loose|compact line spacing
Display true|false instead of 1|0 for logical values
Include or suppress markup formatting that may appear in the display such as the bold headers in tables.

Demo: Record the input table and results of a polynomial curve fit

load census
[fitobj, gof] = fit(cdate, pop, 'poly3', 'normalize', 'on')

Results printed to the command window:

fitobj = 
     Linear model Poly3:
     fitobj(x) = p1*x^3 + p2*x^2 + p3*x + p4
       where x is normalized by mean 1890 and std 62.05
     Coefficients (with 95% confidence bounds):
       p1 =       0.921  (-0.9743, 2.816)
       p2 =       25.18  (23.57, 26.79)
       p3 =       73.86  (70.33, 77.39)
       p4 =       61.74  (59.69, 63.8)

gof = 
  struct with fields:

             sse: 149.77
         rsquare: 0.99879
             dfe: 17
      adjrsquare: 0.99857
            rmse: 2.9682

Capture the input table, the printed fit object, and goodness-of-fit structure as strings:

rawDataStr = formattedDisplayText(table(cdate,pop),'SuppressMarkup',true)
fitStr = formattedDisplayText(fitobj)
gofStr = formattedDisplayText(gof)

Display the strings:

rawDataStr = 
    "    cdate     pop 
         _____    _____
         1790       3.9
         1800       5.3
         1810       7.2
         1820       9.6
         1830      12.9
         1840      17.1
         1850      23.1
         1860      31.4
         1870      38.6
         1880      50.2
         1890      62.9
         1900        76
         1910        92
         1920     105.7
         1930     122.8
         1940     131.7
         1950     150.7
         1960       179
         1970       205
         1980     226.5
         1990     248.7
     "

fitStr = 
    "     Linear model Poly3:
          ary(x) = p1*x^3 + p2*x^2 + p3*x + p4
            where x is normalized by mean 1890 and std 62.05
          Coefficients (with 95% confidence bounds):
            p1 =       0.921  (-0.9743, 2.816)
            p2 =       25.18  (23.57, 26.79)
            p3 =       73.86  (70.33, 77.39)
            p4 =       61.74  (59.69, 63.8)
     "

gofStr = 
    "           sse: 149.77
            rsquare: 0.99879
                dfe: 17
         adjrsquare: 0.99857
               rmse: 2.9682
     "

Combine the strings into a single string and write it to a text file in your temp directory:

txt =  strjoin([rawDataStr; fitStr; gofStr],[newline newline]);
file = fullfile(tempdir,'results.txt');
fid = fopen(file,'w+');
cleanup = onCleanup(@()fclose(fid)); 
fprintf(fid, '%s', txt);
clear cleanup

Open results.txt.

winopen(file) % for Windows platforms

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Meta Cody

Kyle
Last activity on 28 Oct 2019

Cody question help: Remove all the words that end with "ain"

I have been stuck in the Cody question: Problem 31. Remove all the words that end with "ain"

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/problems/31-remove-all-the-words-that-end-with-ain

for the whole afternoon. My codes below passed the first two tests but failed in the third one, because my codes cannot separate "" and ain. Anyone could help?

function s2 = remAin(s1)
s1_cell = strread(s1, '%s');
[s1_cell{find(not(cellfun('isempty', regexp(s1_cell, '\w*ain\>'))) == 1)}] = deal(' ');
s2 = strjoin(s1_cell');
s2 = strrep(s2, sprintf('%c%c%c', 32,32,32), sprintf('%c%c', 32,32));
if s2(end) == ' ' && s2(end-1) == ' '
      s2(end) = [];
end
end

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