MATLAB Programming Fundamentals - MathWorks

Convert Text in Table Variables to Categorical

This example shows how to convert a variable in a table from a cell array of character

vectors to a categorical array.

Load Sample Data and Create a Table

Load sample data gathered from 100 patients.

load patients

whos

Name Size Bytes Class Attributes

Age 100x1 800 double

Diastolic 100x1 800 double

Gender 100x1 12212 cell

Height 100x1 800 double

LastName 100x1 12416 cell

Location 100x1 15008 cell

SelfAssessedHealthStatus 100x1 12340 cell

Smoker 100x1 100 logical

Systolic 100x1 800 double

Weight 100x1 800 double

Store the patient data from Age, Gender, Height, Weight,

SelfAssessedHealthStatus, and Location in a table. Use the unique identifiers in

the variable LastName as row names.

T = table(Age,Gender,Height,Weight,...

SelfAssessedHealthStatus,Location,...

'RowNames',LastName);

Convert Table Variables from Cell Arrays of Character Vectors to Categorical

Arrays

The cell arrays of character vectors, Gender and Location, contain discrete sets of

unique values.

Convert Gender and Location to categorical arrays.

T.Gender = categorical(T.Gender);

T.Location = categorical(T.Location);

Convert Text in Table Variables to Categorical