CODEWITHSUNDEEP
stringmatlab
ocean800
ocean800

Reputation: 3717

Count the occurrences of strings in matlab with white space?

So I want to count the number of times a word appears in a string. For example, the number of times the word hello appears in the following string: 

a = "hello my name is helloson or hello this is not a name hello"

If I do: 

count(a,"hello")

I get 4, because it includes the helloson. I wanted to try to get only the when hello appears as a word so I did: 

count(a,["hello","hello "," hello ", " hello"])

Except that this also gave me 4. Why is this the case? I looked at the documentation and there was nothing said about ignoring whitespace. Why doesn't this work? I thought it was maybe the ["hello"] included in the array, but trying: 

count(a,["hello "," hello ", " hello"])

Again results in 4. What am I missing here?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 191

Answers (2)

Mohammad nagdawi
Mohammad nagdawi

Reputation: 593

You can solve this issue using regular expression

The code I write below will store the hello words in matchStr after match the input string str with the expression. The expression is written in regx and it will do the following comparison, the hello word should come between spaces, a beginning of text followed by space or preceded by space at the end of input.

str = "hello my name is helloson , hello or xhello this is not a name hello";

expression = '(\s|^)hello(\s|$)';

matchStr = regexp(str,expression,'match')

length(matchStr)

Upvotes: 3

Indominus
Indominus

Reputation: 1248

because "is helloson" contains " hello".

Workaround 1: count(" " + a + " ", " hello ")

Workaround 2: strs = strsplit(a," "); then count how many items in strs are exactly "hello"

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions