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 solutioncellfun() 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,:)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
