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Engineering LibreTexts

7.12: Combining Text

  • Page ID
    136677
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    Concatenation means joining text together. MATLAB has several ways to do this, depending on whether you are using strings or character vectors.

    11.1 Joining Strings with join

    Example 30: Join strings with a space

    sentence1 = "Jack and Jill";

    sentence2 = "went up the hill";

    concatStr = join([sentence1, sentence2])

     

    The function join combines multiple strings and adds spaces between them by default.

    11.2 Combining Character Vectors with Square Brackets and blanks

    Character vectors can be combined using square brackets. If you want spaces between words, you need to include them.

    Example 31: Combine character vectors

    word1 = 'Jack';

    word2 = 'and';

    word3 = 'Jill';

    sentence = [word1, blanks(1), word2, blanks(1), word3]

     

    The function blanks(n) creates n blank spaces. This can make character-vector concatenation easier to read.

    11.3 Concatenating with strcat

    Example 32: Use strcat

    word1 = " happy";

    word2 = "Halloween ";

    expr1 = strcat(word1, word2)

     

    word3 = ' happy ';

    word4 = ' Halloween ';

    expr2 = strcat(word3, word4)

     

    The function strcat concatenates two or more string arrays or character vectors horizontally. One important detail is that for character-vector inputs, strcat removes trailing whitespace characters. For string inputs, it does not remove trailing whitespace in the same way.

    Quick Rule

    For beginner code, use join when combining strings with spaces. Use square brackets when combining character vectors and you want full control over spacing.


    7.12: Combining Text is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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