cell string find and replace with mapping vector

Question

I have a cell array 25 x 2 that contains names and codes, called 'names'. The codes are numeric. I have another cell 40 x 4 called 'data'.

One column in the cell 'data' contains a numeric code that can be linked to the other 'names' cell. What I was trying to do is replace the numeric codes in 'data' with the corresponding name from the 'names' cell.

I was looking at converting the numeric code field to a string, line below. Then use the strrep function I believe I would have to create a loop to replace all the strings. Is there a better way of doing this task? Is a loop required?

 num2str(cell2mat(data(:,1)));

Dan · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-02 11:59:07Z

3

You can do this using ismember, however ismember won't work on a cell array of numbers hence I have used cell2mat to convert them to numeric vectors first.

names = {'A', 1; 'B', 2; 'C', 3};
data = {1, 1, 'a'; 2, 2, 'b'; 1, 1, 'c'; 1, 1, 'd'; 3, 3, 'e'};

[~, ind] = ismember(cell2mat(data(:,1)), cell2mat(names(:,2)))
data(:,1) = names(ind)

You can actually make use of comma separated lists to get rid of the cell2matcalls as follows:

[~, ind] = ismember([data{:,1}], [names{:,2}])

edited May 2, 2014 at 11:59

answered May 2, 2014 at 8:48

Dan

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