padcatcell

M = padcatcell(C1, C2, ..., CN} concatenates the cell arrays C1 through CN into one large cell array M. These cells do not have to have the same number of elements. M will have N rows and the k-th row will contain the elements of the k-th cell array. Shorter inputs will be padded with empty cells. Note that the cells are always concatenated along the first dimension (in contrast to PADCAT).

[M, TF] = padcatcell (...) will return a logical array TF with the same size as M. TF is true where M holds an element from the original input. This is usefull to replace the padded empty cells with something else.

Example:
A = {'apple','ball','cat'}
B = {} ; % empty
C = {'dog' ; 'egg'} % note the column orientation
[M, TF] = padcatcell(A, B, C)
M(~TF) = {'-'}

Note: the cells are not limited to cell array of strings, they can hold any type of element.
See also cat, padcat, nones, strvcat, group2cell, catstruct