Searching multiple strings at one time

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I am importing a text file and want to eliminate data I don't need to further study. The array is a 40 x 1 and each row contains its own sentence with data. I want to search for multiple strings since I know what the interesting data points start with. I don't want to use strfind multiple times and combine at the end because that will just make the code unnecessarily long and slow. Ideally, I'd have a scenario such as
exampleStrings = {'This test was run hot'; 'This test failed', 'This test failed', 'This test ran at hot and cold', 'This test ran at ambient'}
check = {'hot', 'cold', 'med'}
x = strfind(exampleStrings, check)
x = [1; 0; 0; 1; 0] (output)
Essentially, the string search cannot search for a perfect match or else it will return all 0's which is why I have been struggling. Any ideas?
  1 Comment
Tao Wang
Tao Wang on 13 Jan 2022
mystr={'123a1','ab','111'};
pat = ("a"|"b");
a = strfind(mystr,pat)
% can get index of each match
ab = contains(mystr,pat)
% logical result

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Accepted Answer

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 22 Sep 2016
If you have R2016b then this would be a good place to use the new contains() string operation.
Otherwise:
~cellfun(@isempty,regexp(exampleStrings,strjoin(check,'|')))
  1 Comment
Tyler Murray
Tyler Murray on 22 Sep 2016
ah I have 16a, contains looks great! Wonder why it took them so long to implement that. Your solution works as well, thank you!

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