How do I remove a certain column from matrices in a cell array in MATLAB?

Question

If I have a cell array containing few matrices in it. Each matrix has different row numbers but same column numbers.

C{1} = [30x4 double] C{2} = [25x4 double] C{3} = [32x4 double] ...etc

If I want to remove the first and the third columns in each matrix, what should I do?

So the cell array will become:

new_C{1} = [30x2 double] new_C{2} = [25x2 double] new_C{3} = [32x2 double]

where those two columns in new_C are from the second and the fourth columns in the cell array C.

Answer 1

I assume you have tried the obvious solution using a for loop. Another way would be using cellfun , combined with logical indexing :

columns = false(1, 4);
columns([2, 4]) = true;
D = cellfun(@(m)m(:,columns), C, 'UniformOutput', 0)

first, we build an index vector for the columns. Then we use cellfun to apply the indexing to every element in the cell array. We use 'UniformOutput', 0 , because we want to obtain another cell array (and the results of the indexing operation are not scalar).