Concatenate two cell arrays of strings with a space in between?

Question

How can I concatenate:

A = {\'hello\'; \'hi\'; \'hey\'}

with

B = {\'Ben\'; \'Karen\'; \'Lisa\'}

with a

Answer 1

A faster (albeit less elegant) alternative to strcat that concatenates strings is a combination of the sprintf and textscan commands:

C = [A; B];
C = textscan(sprintf('%s %s\n', C{:}), '%s', 'delimiter', '\n');

Benchmark

Here's the benchmark code:

A = {'hello' ; 'hi' ; 'hey'};
B = {'Ben' ; 'Karen' ; 'Lisa'};

%// Solution with strcat
tic
for k = 1:1000
    C1 = strcat(A, ' ', B);
end
toc

%// Solution with sprintf and textscan
tic
for k = 1:1000
    C2 = [A; B];
    C2 = textscan(sprintf('%s %s\n', C2{:}), '%s', 'delimiter', '\n');
end
toc

The results are:

Elapsed time is 0.022659 seconds.
Elapsed time is 0.006011 seconds.