Finding a specific character in a string in Matlab

Question

Suppose I have a string \'johndoe@hotmail.com\'. I want to store the string before and after \"@\" into 2 separate strings. What would be the easiest method of

Answer 1

For "easiest",

>> email = 'johndoe@hotmail.com'
email =
johndoe@hotmail.com
>> email == '@'
ans =
  Columns 1 through 13
     0     0     0     0     0     0     0     1     0     0     0     0     0
  Columns 14 through 19
     0     0     0     0     0     0
>> at = find(email == '@')
at =
     8
>> email(1:at-1)
ans =
johndoe
>> email(at+1:end)
ans =
hotmail.com

It would be slightly more complicated if you were looking for something with more than one character, or you weren't sure if there was exactly one @, and in that case MATLAB has a lot of functions for searching through text, including regular expressions (see doc regexp).

Answer 2

If this thread isn't completely enumerated by now, may I add another? A handy perl-based MATLAB function:

email = 'johndoe@hotmail.com';
parts = regexp(email,'@', 'split');

parts is a two element cell array similar to mtrw's implementation of textscan. Maybe overkill, but regexp is much more useful when splitting a string by multiple delimiting characters or pattern searching. The only downside is the use of regular expressions which I still haven't mastered after 15 years of coding.

Answer 3

STRTOK and an index operation should do the trick:

str = 'johndoe@hotmail.com';
[name,address] = strtok(str,'@');
address = address(2:end);

Or the last line could also be:

address(1) = '';

Answer 4

You can use strread:

str = 'johndoe@hotmail.com';
[a b] = strread(str, '%s %s', 'delimiter','@')
a = 
    'johndoe'
b = 
    'hotmail.com'

Answer 5

I used strtok and strrep from Matlab instead.

Answer 6

TEXTSCAN works too.

str = 'johndoe@hotmail.com';
parts = textscan(str, '%s %s', 'Delimiter', '@');

returns a cell array where parts{1} is 'johndoe' and parts{2} is 'hotmail.com'.