Finding a specific character in a string in Matlab

Question

Suppose I have a string called "[email protected]". I want to store the string before and after "@" into 2 separate strings. What would be the easiest method of finding the "@" character or other characters in the string?

Answer 1

For "easiest",

>> email = '[email protected]'
email =
[email protected]
>> 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

I used strtok and strrep from Matlab instead.

Answer 3

STRTOK and an index operation should do the trick:

str = '[email protected]';
[name,address] = strtok(str,'@');
address = address(2:end);

Or the last line could also be:

address(1) = '';

Answer 4

TEXTSCAN works too.

str = '[email protected]';
parts = textscan(str, '%s %s', 'Delimiter', '@');

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

Answer 5

You can use strread:

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