How do I detect empty cells in a cell array? I know the command to remove the empty cell is a(1) = []
, but I can't seem to get MATLAB to automatically detect which cells are empty.
Background:
I preallocated a cell array using a=cell(1,53)
.
Then I used if exist(filename(i))
and textscan to check for a file, and read it in. As a result, when the filename(i)
does not exist, an empty cell results and we move onto the next file.
When I'm finished reading in all the files, I would like to delete the empty cells of a
. I tried if a(i)==[]
Use CELLFUN
Note:
a(i)==[]
won't work. If you want to know whether the the i-th cell is empty, you have to use curly brackets to access the content of the cell. Also,==[]
evaluates to empty, instead oftrue
/false
, so you should use the commandisempty
instead. In short:a(i)==[]
should be rewritten asisempty(a{i})
.All above mentioned answers are incorrect, because in my case when i used them, they removed empty cells and then all elements of my cell array situated in a row manner instead of preserving their actual shape. In fact after using this kind of approach your cell array elements tend to be a row cell vector.
I have found this approach which works correctly in my case.
source : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.softsys.matlab/p3NX0fI6u90
approach: