With those quotation marks, it is already an array -- a character vector.
Perhaps you want it expanded into the numeric matrix [2 2.5 3 3.5 4] ?
If so, the easiest way is to use str2num() on it. That will eval() the string. If you had total control over what went into the string, and if you are not doing code generation, then that can be enough.
If you are doing code generation or if you do not have total control of the string, then you can:
fmt1 = '[%f:%f:%f]';
fmt2 = '%f:%f:%f'
parts = sscanf(TheString, fmt1);
if isempty(parts)
parts = sscanf(TheString, fmt2);
end
if length(parts) < 2
error('Sorry, that is not a range I recognize')
end
if length(parts) == 2
range = parts(1) : parts(2);
else
range = parts(1) : parts(2) : parts(3);
end
