How to remove delimiters, or special characters from a cell?

I have this cell array which contains items followed by special characters used as delimiters: 160225MD0004;#2;#13161504900013;#1 I will first convert this cell to a char. But afterwards, I want to obtain the following on their own:

a = 160225MD0004

b = 13161504900013

Also how to make this general, for example-three items and more: 123345KR00994;#3;#160225MD0004;#2;#13161504900013;#1

I should obtain:

a = 123345KR00994

b = 160225MD0004

c = 13161504900013

Note : (;#3) and (;#) have different usages : first one always follows the items to state the order (;#3)(;#2) (;#1)..etc. The second one (#;)separates two items- notice that the last item 13161504900013 doesn't have a trailing (#;) because there is no adjacent item to separate it from but it is still followed by (;#1) to state order.

Note: the individual alphanumeric characters can be of any length- no standard length. I just need extract them to assign them to individual variables.

Answer 1

[Charles Dunn]

This is a great time for regular expressions! The commands are very similar in bash scripting as well, so it's a useful tool to learn.

%input string
str = '123345KR00994;#3;#160225MD0004;#2;#13161504900013;#1';

%split string in to cell array by delimiter ';#'
t = regexp(str,';#','split');
%put alphanumeric values along first row, order along second row
t = reshape(t,2,length(t)/2);
alphanumeric = t(1,:);
%convert order to array of numbers
indices = str2double(t(2,:));

%order alphanumeric values properly (already ordered in example string...)
alphanumeric = alphanumeric(length(alphanumeric) - indices + 1);

[Leonardo Wayne]

Thanks that is really good. I have actually done the same thing but with one or two steps more since I have to convert from cell to char. I have a Followup question: Say now I want to create folders with the names of the different cells of the alphanumeric cell array but obviously a general number of cells again. Using for loop and mkdir function, how can this be done?

Answer 2

[Leonardo Wayne]

Hi I a get an error when I incorporate your code to my m file. See below.

The indices variables is a 1x3 array with values 3 2 NaN.

Help explain or fix?

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[Charles Dunn]

the convert string is cut off on your screen shot, but are you sure it ends with ";#1"? my first guess would be that there is something strange happening at the end of the line. maybe there is an extra character at the end, like a space or a new line? not sure...

[Leonardo Wayne]

Thanks I have made mistake by adding a (') character at the start and end of the excel cell that I am reading from. That is the source of the error.