Finding indexes of strings in a string array in Matlab - string

I have two string arrays and I want to find where each string from the first array is in the second array, so i tried this:
for i = 1:length(array1);
cmp(i) = strfind(array2,array1(i,:));
end
This doesn't seem to work and I get an error: "must be one row".

Just for the sake of completeness, an array of strings is nothing but a char matrix. This can be quite restrictive because all of your strings must have the same number of elements. And that's what #neerad29 solution is all about.
However, instead of an array of strings you might want to consider a cell array of strings, in which every string can be arbitrarily long. I will report the very same #neerad29 solution, but with cell arrays. The code will also look a little bit smarter:
a = {'abcd'; 'efgh'; 'ijkl'};
b = {'efgh'; 'abcd'; 'ijkl'};
pos=[];
for i=1:size(a,1)
AreStringFound=cellfun(#(x) strcmp(x,a(i,:)),b);
pos=[pos find(AreStringFound)];
end
But some additional words might be needed:
pos will contain the indices, 2 1 3 in our case, just like #neerad29 's solution
cellfun() is a function which applies a given function, the strcmp() in our case, to every cell of a given cell array. x will be the generic cell from array b which will be compared with a(i,:)
the cellfun() returns a boolean array (AreStringFound) with true in position j if a(i,:) is found in the j-th cell of b and the find() will indeed return the value of j, our proper index. This code is more robust and works also if a given string is found in more than one position in b.

strfind won't work, because it is used to find a string within another string, not within an array of strings. So, how about this:
a = ['abcd'; 'efgh'; 'ijkl'];
b = ['efgh'; 'abcd'; 'ijkl'];
cmp = zeros(1, size(a, 1));
for i = 1:size(a, 1)
for j = 1:size(b, 1)
if strcmp(a(i, :), b(j, :))
cmp(i) = j;
break;
end
end
end
cmp =
2 1 3

Related

VBA Greater Than Function Not Working

I have an issue where I am trying to compare a values that can be alphanumeric, only numeric, or only alphabetic.
The code originally worked fine for comparing anything within the same 100s group (IE 1-99 with alphabetic components). However when I included 100+ into it, it malfunctioned.
The current part of the code reads:
For j = 1 To thislength
If lennew < j Then
enteredval = Left("100A", lennew)
ElseIf lennew >= j Then
enteredval = Left("100A", j)
End If
If lenold < j Then
cellval = Left("67", lenold)
ElseIf lenold >= j Then
cellval = Left("67", j)
End If
'issue occurs here
If enteredval >= cellval Then
newrow = newrow+1
End If
Next j
The issue occurs in the last if statement.
When cycling through the 100 is greater than the 67 but still skips over. I tried to declare them both as strings (above this part of code) to see if that would help but it didn't.
What I am trying to accomplish is to sort through a bunch of rows and find where it should go. IE the 100A should go between 100 and 100B.
Sorry lennew=len("100A") and lennold=len("67"). And thislength=4or whatever is larger of the two lengths.
The problem is that you're trying to solve the comparison problem by attacking specific values, and that's going to be a problem to maintain. I'd make the problem more generic by creating a function that supplies takes two values returns -1 if the first operand is "before" the second, 0 if they are the same, and 1 if the first operand is "after" the second per your rules.
You could then restructure your code to eliminate the specific hardcoded prefix testing and then just call the comparison function directly, eg (and this is COMPLETELY untested, off-the-cuff, and my VBA is VERRRRRY stale :) but the idea is there: (it also assumes the existence of a simple string function called StripPrefix that just takes a string and strips off any leading digits, which I suspect you can spin up fairly readily yourself)
Function CompareCell(Cell1 as String, Cell2 as String) as Integer
Dim result as integer
Dim suffix1 as string
Dim suffix2 as string
if val(cell1)< val(cell2) Then
result = -1
else if val(cell1)>val(cell2) then
result = 1
else if val(cell1)=val(cell2) then
if len(cell1)=len(cell2) then
result =0
else
' write code to strip leading numeric prefixes
' You must supply StripPrefix, but it's pretty simple
' I just omitted it here for clarity
suffix1=StripPrefix(cell1) ' eg returns "ABC" for "1000ABC"
suffix2=StripPrefix(cell2)
if suffix1 < suffix2 then
result = -1
else if suffix1 > suffix2 then
result = 1
else
result = 0
end if
end if
return result
end function
A function like this then allows you to take any two cell references and compare them directly to make whatever decision you need:
if CompareCell(enteredval,newval)>=0 then
newrow=newrow+1
end if

Octave - return the position of the first occurrence of a string in a cell array

Is there a function in Octave that returns the position of the first occurrence of a string in a cell array?
I found findstr but this returns a vector, which I do not want. I want what index does but it only works for strings.
If there is no such function, are there any tips on how to go about it?
As findstr is being deprecated, a combination of find and strcmpi may prove useful. strcmpi compares strings by ignoring the case of the letters which may be useful for your purposes. If this is not what you want, use the function without the trailing i, so strcmp. The input into strcmpi or strcmp are the string to search for str and for your case the additional input parameter is a cell array A of strings to search in. The output of strcmpi or strcmp will give you a vector of logical values where each location k tells you whether the string k in the cell array A matched with str. You would then use find to find all locations of where the string matched, but you can further restrain it by specifying the maximum number of locations n as well as where to constrain your search - specifically if you want to look at the first or last n locations where the string matched.
If the desired string is in str and your cell array is stored in A, simply do:
index = find(strcmpi(str, A)), 1, 'first');
To reiterate, find will find all locations where the string matched, while the second and third parameters tell you to only return the first index of the result. Specifically, this will return the first occurrence of the desired searched string, or the empty array if it can't be found.
Example Run
octave:8> A = {'hello', 'hello', 'how', 'how', 'are', 'you'};
octave:9> str = 'hello';
octave:10> index = find(strcmpi(str, A), 1, 'first')
index = 1
octave:11> str = 'goodbye';
octave:12> index = find(strcmpi(str, A), 1, 'first')
index = [](1x0)

Extract last alpha+numeric pair in a string in Excel

I'm trying to figure out a way to extract the last alpha+numeric sequence in a string made up of similar patterns. The sequence is an alpha+numeric pair: an alpha string (one or more letters) plus a numeric string (one or more numbers). For instance:
G98Y8RT9 -- I need to isolate "RT9"
H8L77 -- I need to isolate "L77"
D64RL19HT7899 -- I need to isolate "HT7899"
As shown above, there are a variable number of characters in each part of the pair and also in the number of pairs preceding the last one. I've tried Excel formulas using FIND, ISNUMBER, etc., but I couldn't figure out the logic to make it work for these variables.
Is there a formula that would help? Or is some kind of regex VBA function the way to go?
I think this should work, as a user-defined function you can place it in a standard module, and call it like:
=GetLastPair($A$1), etc.
Here is the function:
Function GetLastPair(str As String)
Dim numPart As Integer
Dim strPart As Integer
Do Until Not IsNumeric(Mid(str, Len(str) - numPart, 1))
numPart = numPart + 1
Loop
Do Until IsNumeric(Mid(str, Len(str) - numPart - strPart, 1))
strPart = strPart + 1
Loop
GetLastPair = Right(str, numPart + strPart)
End Function
Results:
A bit long formula, but seems to work:
=RIGHT(A1,MATCH(TRUE,ISNUMBER(1*MID(A1,LEN(A1)-MATCH(FALSE,ISNUMBER(1*MID(A1,LEN(A1)-{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8},1)),0)-{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8},1)),0)+MATCH(FALSE,ISNUMBER(1*MID(A1,LEN(A1)-{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8},1)),0)-1)

Is it possible to concatenate a string with series of number?

I have a string (eg. 'STA') and I want to make a cell array that will be a concatenation of my sting with a numbers from 1 to X.
I want the code to do something like the fore loop here below:
for i = 1:Num
a = [{a} {strcat('STA',num2str(i))}]
end
I want the end results to be in the form of {<1xNum cell>}
a = 'STA1' 'STA2' 'STA3' ...
(I want to set this to a uitable in the ColumnFormat array)
ColumnFormat = {{a},... % 1
'numeric',... % 2
'numeric'}; % 3
I'm not sure about starting with STA1, but this should get you a list that starts with STA (from which I guess you could remove the first entry).
N = 5;
[X{1:N+1}] = deal('STA');
a = genvarname(X);
a = a(2:end);
You can do it with combination of NUM2STR (converts numbers to strings), CELLSTR (converts strings to cell array), STRTRIM (removes extra spaces)and STRCAT (combines with another string) functions.
You need (:) to make sure the numeric vector is column.
x = 1:Num;
a = strcat( 'STA', strtrim( cellstr( num2str(x(:)) ) ) );
As an alternative for matrix with more dimensions I have this helper function:
function c = num2cellstr(xx, varargin)
%Converts matrix of numeric data to cell array of strings
c = cellfun(#(x) num2str(x,varargin{:}), num2cell(xx), 'UniformOutput', false);
Try this:
N = 10;
a = cell(1,N);
for i = 1:N
a(i) = {['STA',num2str(i)]};
end

MATLAB empty cell(n,m) array of strings?

What is the quickest way to create an empty cell array of strings ?
cell(n,m)
creates an empty cell array of double.
How about a similar command but creating empty strings ?
Depends on what you want to achieve really. I guess the simplest method would be:
repmat({''},n,m);
Assignment to all cell elements using the colon operator will do the job:
m = 3; n = 5;
C = cell(m,n);
C(:) = {''}
The cell array created by cell(n,m) contains empty matrices, not doubles.
If you really need to pre populate your cell array with empty strings
test = cell(n,m);
test(:) = {''};
test(1,:) = {'1st row'};
test(:,1) = {'1st col'};
This is a super old post but I'd like to add an approach that might be working. I am not sure if it's working in an earlier version of MATLAB. I tried in 2018+ versions and it works.
Instead of using remat, it seems even more convenient and intuitive to start a cell string array like this:
C(1:10) = {''} % Array of empty char
And the same approach can be used to generate cell array with other data types
C(1:10) = {""} % Array of empty string
C(1:10) = {[]} % Array of empty double, same as cell(1,10)
But be careful with scalers
C(1:10) = {1} % an 1x10 cell with all values = {[1]}
C(1:10) = 1 % !!!Error
C(1:10) = '1' % !!!Error
C(1:10) = [] % an 1x0 empty cell array

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