MATLAB and cell array handling in for loop

Question

I am new to MATLAB and would like to extract data from a cell array that I got from my database:

sensors = 

[ 1]    [23]    [1]    [  0]    [0.1000]            [1x29 char]
[ 2]    [23]    [1]    [120]    [0.1000]            [1x43 char]
[ 3]    [23]    [1]    [120]    [0.1000]            [1x42 char]
[ 4]    [23]    [1]    [ 15]    [0.1000]    'Air Temp Grey Box'
[ 5]    [23]    [1]    [120]    [0.1000]            [1x34 char]
[ 6]    [23]    [1]    [120]    [0.1000]            [1x33 char]
[ 7]    [23]    [1]    [120]    [0.1000]    'Pool Water Temp'  
[ 8]    [23]    [2]    [  0]    [0.1000]            [1x28 char]
[ 9]    [23]    [1]    [ 30]    [0.1000]            [1x22 char]
[10]    [23]    [1]    [ 30]    [0.1000]            [1x22 char]
[11]    [23]    [1]    [ 30]    [0.1000]            [1x21 char]
[12]    [23]    [1]    [ 15]    [0.1000]            [1x20 char]
[13]    [23]    [1]    [ 15]    [0.1000]            [1x23 char]
[14]    [23]    [1]    [ 30]    [0.1000]            [1x22 char]
[15]    [23]    [1]    [ 15]    [0.1000]    'Ground Air '      
[16]    [23]    [1]    [  5]    [0.1000]    'Boiler Cold Water'
[17]    [23]    [1]    [  5]    [0.1000]    'Boiler Hot Water' 
[18]    [23]    [1]    [  5]    [0.1000]    'Boiler CH Flow'   
[19]    [23]    [1]    [  5]    [0.1000]    'Boiler CH Return' 

Now I would like to grab the first column, i.e. the numbers 1 to 19 as well as the respective names in the last column and use them in a for loop, e.g.:

for ID=xxxx
    str = num2str(ID);
    SQLcommand = strcat('SELECT FROM data where ID=',str);
    answer = database.exec(SQLcommand);
    ......
end

I have tried several different attempts but never succeeded in getting just one of the elements.

Help is appreciated :), thanks in advance. axon

Answer 1

Though sage's answer above will work, it's not really proper, or efficient use of Matlab's cell arrays. You can eliminate many of the extraneous function calls by using proper cell array content indexing. you can address any element of a cell array in two ways - () or {}. () gets the cell, still as a cell. {} however, pulls out the contents of the cell, in it's base type.

So sensors(1, end) is a 1x1 cell array, but sensors{1, end} is a 1x29 char string.

For your problem:

numRows = size(sensors, 1);
for rowIdx = 1:numRows;
    sensorName = sensors{rowIdx, end};
    sql = ['select * from data where ID = ' num2str(sensors{rowIdx, 1})];
    ...
end

You could also eliminate the num2str() call if you fetched the sensor ID as a char instead of a number - i.e. if your original DB fetch that populated sensors did the cast.

In addition, if you weren't further querying from the DB, you could vectorize this whole thing, but I'm afraid I'm away from my Matlab machine, so I can't build that one off the top of my head.