Find index of cells containing a string

Hi ,

Attached the "text" cell array. I tried to find the index of cells that match the string 'CERT'. I tried many approaches but all failed to identify the index of the cell. For example

cellfind = @(string)(@(cell_contents)(strcmp(string,cell_contents)));
logical_cells = cellfun(cellfind('CERT'),text);

gave only zeros. Any help to find the index of the cell which is the 7th row and the 2nd column in this case would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

The problem is not with your search expression, which works fine, but the fact that the exact string 'CERT' is not present in your cell array.

>>double(s{7, 2})
ans = 
    67    69    82    84   160   160

Notice the two 160 characters at the end of the string ([67 69 82 84] are the character codes for CERT). In my version of matlab, char(160) renders as a blank space (depending on your locale it may render differently).

In fact, if you look through your whole matrix, there are a fair number of strings where the character 160 appears. It seems that it's the only character outside the ASCII range, as well:

cellfun(@(s) double(s(s>127)), text, 'UniformOutput', false) %show characters outside ASCII

Probably, the simplest thing is to remove these characters (which I assume you did not want in the first place):

text = cellfun(@(s) s(s<128), text, 'UniformOutput', false);

Your search expression will then work:

>>[row, col] = find(cellfun(@(s) strcmp(s, 'CERT'), text))
row =
   7
col =
   2

[wesso Dadoyan]

Thanks for your very thorough reply.it works well now.