Using xlsread in MATLAB to read number and string data

Question

I have a large column of data in Excel that I'd like to read into a string cell array. However, some of the entries are numbers, and the rest are strings. So I have something like

The first row is a header row, so we ignore that. When I use

[~, ID] = xlsread('data.xlsx', 'A2:A125581')

ID contains only the string entries, not the numeric entries.

How can I get xlsread to treat the numbers as strings, so I can read everything as a string?

does this help? mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-36XFH9/… — Mohammad Moghimi
– Mohammad Moghimi, Commented Apr 14, 2012 at 20:16
No, I'd like to read everything as a string, not separate the numbers and strings. — Tianxiang Xiong
– Tianxiang Xiong, Commented Apr 14, 2012 at 20:27

Jonas · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-14 20:37:55Z

4

XLSREAD returns three outputs. The third one is a cell array containing everything that has been read. However, the cell array has numbers where the data is numeric, so if you want everything as strings, you have to convert these:

%# read everything into one cell array
[~,~,raw] = xlsread('data.xlsx', 'A2:A125581');
%# find numbers
containsNumbers = cellfun(@isnumeric,raw);
%# convert to string
raw(containsNumbers) = cellfun(@num2str,raw(containsNumbers),'UniformOutput',false);

answered Apr 14, 2012 at 20:37

Jonas

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