Appending string to Matlab array

Question

How do I append a string to a Matlab array column wise?

Here is a small code snippet of what I am trying to do:

for_loop   filename = 'string';   name=[name; filename] end 

Answer 1

You need to use cell arrays. If the number of iterations are known beforehand, I suggest you preallocate:

N = 10; names = cell(1,N); for i=1:N     names{i} = 'string'; end 

otherwise you can do something like:

names = {}; for i=1:10     names{end+1} = 'string'; end 

Answer 2

As other answers have noted, using cell arrays is probably the most straightforward approach, which will result in your variable name being a cell array where each cell element contains a string.

However, there is another option using the function STRVCAT, which will vertically concatenate strings. Instead of creating a cell array, this will create a 2-D character matrix with each row containing one string. STRVCAT automatically pads the ends of the strings with spaces if necessary to correctly fill the rows of the matrix:

>> string1 = 'hi'; >> string2 = 'there'; >> S = strvcat(string1,string2)  S =  hi there