Regular expressions in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Regular expressions in MATLAB

📖 Scenario: You work in a small company that processes customer feedback. The feedback contains many sentences, and you want to find specific words or patterns inside these sentences to analyze customer sentiment.

🎯 Goal: You will create a MATLAB script that uses regular expressions to find all words starting with the letter 'a' in a list of customer feedback sentences.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a cell array of strings called feedback with exact sentences.

Create a pattern string variable called pattern to find words starting with 'a'.

Use the regexp function with the 'match' option to find all matching words.

Print the matched words using disp.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Regular expressions help find patterns in text data like customer feedback, emails, or logs.

💼 Career

Knowing how to use regular expressions in MATLAB is useful for data analysis, text processing, and automating report generation.

1

Create the feedback data

Create a cell array called feedback with these exact sentences: 'I absolutely love this product', 'Amazing service and friendly staff', 'The ambiance was average', 'Affordable prices and good quality'.

MATLAB

% Create the cell array feedback with the given sentences
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a cell array of strings in MATLAB.

2

Define the regular expression pattern

Create a variable called pattern and set it to the regular expression string '\<[aA]\w*\>' to find words starting with the letter 'a'.

MATLAB

feedback = {"I absolutely love this product", "Amazing service and friendly staff", "The ambiance was average", "Affordable prices and good quality"};
% Define the pattern variable to find words starting with 'a'
% Your code here

Need a hint?

The pattern '\<[aA]\w*\>' matches words starting with 'a'. Use double backslashes in MATLAB strings.

3

Find all matching words using regexp

Use the regexp function with variables feedback and pattern, and the option 'match' to find all words starting with 'a'. Store the result in a variable called matches.

MATLAB

feedback = {"I absolutely love this product", "Amazing service and friendly staff", "The ambiance was average", "Affordable prices and good quality"};
pattern = '\';
% Use regexp to find matches and store in matches
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use regexp with the 'match' option to get matching words as cell arrays.

4

Display the matched words

Use disp to print the variable matches to show all words starting with 'a' found in the feedback.

MATLAB

feedback = {"I absolutely love this product", "Amazing service and friendly staff", "The ambiance was average", "Affordable prices and good quality"};
pattern = '\';
matches = regexp(feedback, pattern, 'match');
% Display the matches variable
% Your code here

Need a hint?

Use disp(matches) to print the cell array of matches.