How do you remove duplicates of nested cells?

I have cell array that looks like the following:

RomanticGestures = ...                           % Cell array 5x1
                    {{List of Flowers};...       % nested Cell array 15x1
                    {List of Chocolates};...     % nested Cell array 15x1
                    {List of Movies};...         % nested Cell array 17x1
                    {List of Flowers};...        % nested Duplicate Cell array 15x1
                    {List of Wines}};...         % nested Cell array 34x1

But I do not need the nested cell that contains the list of flowers twice. So this is what I want:

RomanticGestures = ...                      % Cell array 5x1
                    {{List of Flowers};...  % nested Cell array 15x1
                    {List of Chocolates;... % nested Cell array 15x1
                    {List of Movies};...    % nested Cell array 17x1
                    {List of Restaurants}}; % nested Cell array 34x1
    

I also need to know what row the duplicate occured in.

have tried unique but I think I have the notation wrong. I have tried:

RomanticGestures=unique(RomanticGestures)

Also

RomanticGestures=unique(cell2mat(RomanticGestures),'rows')

cell2mat doesnt work.

Any suggestions are appreciated :) Thank you!

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

Sounds like:

Dates{1} = unique(Dates{1});  %What a misleading variable names if it doesn't contain dates/times!

is what you're after.

[Kris Govertsen]

unique does identify non-duplicates but i need to know which row had the duplicate in it.

[Guillaume]

[uvalues, idxuvals] = unique(somecellarray);
idxduplicates = setdiff(1:numel(somecellarray), idxuvals);

will return the indices of all the elements that were removed by unique.

[Kris Govertsen]

This worked! I ended up doing:

[~, idxRomanticGestures] = unique(RomanticGestures);
RomanticGestures=RomanticGestures(idxRomanticGestures);
OtherRelatedArrays=OtherRelatedArrays(idxRomanticGestures);

Answer 2

[Jan]

A loop approach:

C = RomanticGestures;
n = numel(C);
remove = false(1, n);
for i1 = 1:n
    for i2 = i1 + 1:n
        if ~remove(C{i2}) && isequal(C{i1}, C{i2})
            remove(i2) = true;
        end
    end
end
C(remove) = [];

Another appraoch with DataHash https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/31272-datahash:

C = RomanticGestures;
n = numel(C);
H = cell(1, n);
for iC = 1:n
    H{iC} = DataHash(C{iC}, 'base64');
end

[~, index] = unique(H);
Result     = C(index)

[Kris Govertsen]

DataHash doesnt work for characters

[Jan]

@Kris: Please explain "doesn't work" with any details. I had a typo in my code, which is fixed now, but the problem was the round parentheses for indexing H, instead of the curly braces.

Of course DataHash works for characters.

If you provide some Matlab code, which produces the input data, I could test my code before posting it.