How to search for substring in cell array and get the corresponding index then?

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Dear community,
i have a very big 3D cell array that contains either doubles or strings. I need to find the cells that contain the string EXPERIMENT with the given index of my cell array.
I already tried approaches like strcmp or strfind, but I am still stuck.
Below is a picture of a subset of the cell array.
Thank you in advance,
Paul

Accepted Answer

Askic V
Askic V on 7 Dec 2022
Please have a look at the following example:
C1 = {'Smith','Chung','Morales' [4 5 6]; ...
'Sanchez','Peterson',1:15,'Adams';...
'Adams','Johnson',[2.1 4.2],'Adams'}
C1 = 3×4 cell array
{'Smith' } {'Chung' } {'Morales' } {[4 5 6]} {'Sanchez'} {'Peterson'} {[1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15]} {'Adams'} {'Adams' } {'Johnson' } {[ 2.1000 4.2000]} {'Adams'}
C2 = cellfun(@num2str,C1,'UniformOutput',false)
C2 = 3×4 cell array
{'Smith' } {'Chung' } {'Morales' } {'4 5 6'} {'Sanchez'} {'Peterson'} {'1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15'} {'Adams' } {'Adams' } {'Johnson' } {'2.1 4.2' } {'Adams' }
C3 = strfind(C2, 'Ada')
C3 = 3×4 cell array
{0×0 double} {0×0 double} {0×0 double} {0×0 double} {0×0 double} {0×0 double} {0×0 double} {[ 1]} {[ 1]} {0×0 double} {0×0 double} {[ 1]}
ind = ~cellfun('isempty', C3)
ind = 3×4 logical array
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1
I think you should be able to use it in your own application. C1 becomes your val

More Answers (1)

GeeTwo
GeeTwo on 7 Dec 2022
If I'm understanding correctly,
cellfun(@numel,strfind(string(val),"EXPERIMENT"))
will give you a matrix with 1's where the string is found and 0's where it isn't, whether due to it being a string without "EXPERIMENT" or not a string at all.
  1 Comment
Paul Hinze
Paul Hinze on 7 Dec 2022
Hi
if i enter; cellfun(@numel,strfind(string(stimuli),"EXPERIMENT")), where stimuli is my variable i get following error message: Error using string
Conversion from cell failed. Element 1 must be convertible to a string scalar.

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