CODEWITHSUNDEEP
matlabprintf
Jóhann
Jóhann

Reputation: 153

Get a string in fprintf output to display all characters

I'm trying to write a matlab code to generate some kind of result page in a textfile but there seems to be some basic knowledge gap here (I'm new to matlab). So the thing that has me confused is how matlab handles strings. I thought I could create a vector full of strings e.g. SampleNr = ['sample1','sample2']; and later take that vector and print out to the file one specific element, e.g. fprintf(fid, '%s', SampleNr(i)); but when I run this I only get the character in position i in the string instead of the whole string. As I said this is most likely me misunderstanding this concept, and searches on the mathworks site haven't made this clearer to me so I seek the collective wisdom of stackexchange. A MWE would be: 

 SampleNr = ['sample1','sample2'];
 sprintf('%s', SampleNr(2))

A method to get the whole string would be appreciated, but I would also like to have this confusion cleared up if possible, so in the future I can work confidently with strings in matlab. Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 14089

Answers (1)

Oli
Oli

Reputation: 16035

In matlab a string is an array of characters, so when you write ['sample1','sample2'], it concatanates 2 strings to make one string 'sample1sample2'.

To be clear, when you write a string 'sample', it is stored like this: ['s','t','r','i','n','g']

To do what you want, you need to use cells:

SampleNr = {'sample1','sample2'}
sprintf('%s', SampleNr{2})

Upvotes: 4

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