MATLAB Find Exact String in Cell Array

Last Updated : 22 Nov, 2022

Cell arrays in MATLAB store data of various data types as a cell. These cells could contain data of different types but belong to the same array. Now, this article is focused on finding an exact string in a cell array in MATLAB. This can be done easily by using a combination of two MATLAB functions, the strcmp() and find() functions. Let us see how the same is done

Syntax:

s_log = strcmp(<array>,<string>)

index = find(s_log)

This will return a vector with indices of all string elements that exactly match the given string. The strcmp() function takes an array and a string as input. Then it compares the string with all values in the passed array and returns a logical array with 1 on matched cells and 0 on unmatched ones. See below to understand the same.

Example 1:

Matlab

% MATLAB program for find Exact String in Cell Array 
% cell array 
arr = cell({'geeks', 'for', 'geeks'}); 
  
% String to be checked 
str = 'geeks';     
  
% Getting  a logical array from strcmp 
strcmp(arr,str)

Output:

This should return a vector [1 0 1] as the string str appears twice in the array arr on indices 1 and 3.

Now, we can use the find function to get the indices of non-zero elements from this logical array, which will be the same as the indices of appearance of our ‘str’ string.

Example 2:

Matlab

% MATLAB program  
arr = cell({'geeks', 'for', 'geeks'}); 
str = 'geeks'; 
ind_log = strcmp(arr,str); 
index = find(ind_log)

Output:

As it can be verified, the string ‘geeks’ appear on two indices 1 and 3, and the same result is given by our program. Let us take another example where we find the string ‘devil’ in a given cell array.

Example 3:

Matlab

% MATLAB code for array 
arr = cell({'devil', 'is', 'not','home'}); 
  
% String 
str = 'devil'; 
  
% Finding logical array 
ind_log = strcmp(arr,str); 
  
%Finding indices using find functions 
index = find(ind_log);