Deconvolution of nested cell arrays in Matlab : Pascal Schulthess

Pascal Schulthess

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

Deconvolution of nested cell arrays in Matlab

by Pascal Schulthess

Recently, I faced the problem of getting heavily nested cell arrays, and since there’s no built-in function to deconvolve such cell array, I had to find another solution.

If you have a nested array nestedArray which is defined as

nestedArray = {{'a','b'},'c'};

and you want to flatten it in way that it looks like

flatArray = {'a','b','c'};

you need to write a short function which looks like

function flatArray = flattenCell(nestedArray)
  error(nargchk(1,1,nargin));
  if ~iscell(nestedArray),
    error('Must be a cell array.');
  end
  flatArray{1} = [];
  for i=1:numel(nestedArray),
    if iscell(nestedArray{i}),
      y = flattenCell(nestedArray{i});
      [flatArray{end+1:end+length(y)}] = deal(y{:});
    else
      flatArray{end+1} = nestedArray{i};
  end
end
flatArray(1) = [];