How to Remove Rows in Table

Hi, I have a data table here.

Let's say that I want to get rid of the people that does not like animal, signified by a blank space instead of a Y.

How do I make a new data table that removes these rows and forms a new table that only contains the Y.

Thank you!

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

Read in the data; determine which rows are empty under "LikesAnimals"; then remove those rows.

t = readtable('data table.xlsx','ReadRowNames',true);  % use full path if possible
noLikeIdx = cellfun(@isempty,t.LikesAnimals); 
t(noLikeIdx, :) = [];

[Minjun Seo]

Thank you sir!

[Adam Danz]

Glad I could help!

[Minjun Seo]

Similarly, if I had another column that either was blank or contained a positive number, is there a way to store those specific rows?

[Adam Danz]

You can't have missing numbers. You can have NaNs, but not missing. If the numbers are represented as strings, then you can have missing strings. Is that the case? are the numbers represented as strings ('5') rather than numeric (5)?

Or perhaps the column is a cell array (you can also have empty cells).

The solution will depend on what you're working with: number, strings, cells, something else?

[Minjun Seo]

Actually, it is represented as NaN, is there a way to similarly filter out those with NaN?

[Adam Danz]

Yes. In my answer above, the variable "noLikeIdx" is an index of rows that will be eliminated.

Here's how to create an index of rows that have NaN values or values less than 0 based on values stored in a column named "OtherData".

rowIdx = isnan(t.OtherData) | t.OtherData < 0; 
%        { find nan values} or {values less than 0}