Making cell array of cells of strings the same size by adding empty strings

Hello,

Could someone please help me with the following:

I have a cell array of cells containing strings. The cells withing the cells have different length. I would like to write an empty string '' to make all the cells the same size.

Cell array of cells of string example:

c = {{'a1', 'B20', 'd_3'}; {'b44', 'C5', 'e_12', 'k234'}; {'a8', 'T565', 'V-d3'}; {'b44', 'C5', 'e_12', 'k234', 'k234', 'k234'}};

c =

4×1 cell array
    {1×3 cell}
    {1×4 cell}
    {1×3 cell}
    {1×6 cell}

len = cellfun('length', c)

len =

3
4
3
6

I need all the cells in c to be the same length, ie of length max(len) which is 6. I would like to add empty Strings '' from the last value to the 6th columns for all the cells that have a length that is less than 6.

so I would like to transform c into a cNew that would look like this this:

cNew =  {{'a1', 'B20', 'd_3', '', '', ''}; {'b44', 'C5', 'e_12', 'k234', '', ''}; {'a8', 'T565', 'V-d3', '', '', ''}; {'b44', 'C5', 'e_12', 'k234', 'k234', 'k234'}};

cNew =

4×1 cell array

    {1×6 cell}
    {1×6 cell}
    {1×6 cell}
    {1×6 cell}
    
len = cellfun('length', cNew) 

len =

6
6
6
6

If anyone could help I would be very grateful, thank you.

Best Regards;

Cecile

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

maxlen = max(cellfun(@numel, yourcellarray));
newcellarray = cellfun(@(s) [s, repmat({''}, 1, maxlen - numel(s))], yourcellarray, 'UniformOutput', false);

would be one way.

[Cecile]

Thank you very much, that's exactly it.

[Dora Schuller]

Hi @Guillaume, thanks, it worked for me too. I would like to use the cell2table function, but I still get the result that my table contains only rows of {1x2 cell}.

So I had a similar input as in the question above:

z = {{{'a'}}
{{'b'} {'c'}}}


z =

  2×1 cell array

    {1×1 cell}
    {1×2 cell}

Using your code, I got this, which looks good:

newcellarray =

  1×2 cell array

    {1×2 cell}    {1×2 cell}

When I do cell2table:

    >> cell2table(z)

ans =

  2×1 table

        z     
    __________

    {1×1 cell}
    {1×2 cell}

And I would like to convert it to a table like this:

var1 var2

'a' ''

'b' 'c'