comparing table values using isequal

Hi,

I have a table M. The second column contains either the letter 's' or letter 'f'.

I would like to put all the rows with the letter 'f' in the second column into a new table A with the following code

pocet_radku = height(M);
j=1;

for i=1:pocet_radku
    TF = isequal ("M(i,2)",'f')
    if TF == 1
        
       A(j,:)= M(i,:);
       j = j+1;
    else
    end
    
end

Unfortunatelly, the isequal function return only zeros. Any idea why? In there syntax error that I'm not aware of?

Testing in a command window:

>> isequal ("M(180,2)",'f')

ans =

  logical

   0

>> M(180,2)

ans =

  table

    Var2 
    _____

    {'f'}

Thanks a lot for any answers

Answer 1

[Cris LaPierre]

This can be done much simpler. Try something like this.

A = M(M{:,2}=="f",:);

[Jakub Steiner]

Nice! Works as well and without my clumsy cycles.

Thanks a lot!

[Cris LaPierre]

This can be made even simpler by using the variable name:

A = M(M.Var2=="f",:);

Answer 2

[Fangjun Jiang]

try TF = isequal (M.Var2{i},'f')

[Jakub Steiner]

Works! Thank you a lot

Answer 3

[BOB MATHEW SYJI]

Instead of

TF = isequal ("M(i,2)",'f')

try,

TF = strcmp (M.2nd_variable,'f')

Answer 4

[Alvery]

The other problem with table equality that is worth mentioning - !! (this is a mistake, see comment below) if you use setdiff() or other methods that work on equality, the comparison is made including the table properties, not just the data in the table. Most of the time this doesn't matter, but if you get your tables out of data files using readtable(), it's easy to end up with "useful" extra data in the table properties that makes comparison difficult.

In my case, I was comparing two data sets, one of which was stored in .csv format, the other in .xlsx format. The column headers in the spreadsheets were sometimes valid matlab variable names and sometimes not (eg. mass[1], mass[2]...). The variable names were autoconverted to mass_1_, mass_2_ and in the case of the .csv file import, the orginial name was stored in mytable.Properties.VariableDescriptions, but only for autoconverted column names. (!! also a mistake) As a result, selecting columns from the table and comparing them automatically returned false if the table property had a VariableDescriptons property populated, even if the data content is identical.

[Steven Lord]

As of a couple releases ago, you can have table arrays with row and variable names that aren't valid MATLAB variable names (as validated by the isvarname function.) They can now have spaces, square brackets, etc.

A = array2table(magic(4), VariableNames = ["this name includes spaces", "mass[1]", "12345", "x"])

A = 4×4 table
    this name includes spaces    mass[1]    12345    x 
    _________________________    _______    _____    __

               16                   2         3      13
                5                  11        10       8
                9                   7         6      12
                4                  14        15       1

Note that if you wanted to retrieve those variable names that aren't isvarname using A.variablename syntax, you'll have to handle the variablename specification a little specially.

A.("mass[1]")

ans = 4×1

2 11 7 14

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A.x % This works fine though

ans = 4×1

13 8 12 1

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But you can use those names with normal () or {} indexing.

A(3, "mass[1]")

ans = table
    mass[1]
    _______

       7   

The functions for importing tabular data into tables or timetables should have a name-value argument that lets you specify if you want to preserve the variable names or to modify them as in earlier releases. For readtable that argument is named VariableNamingRule.

[Alvery]

Steven, Thanks. That's useful to know.

Having done some experiments, it seems I got it wrong - actually isequal(T1, T2) does not compare the non-significant Properties of a table. My mistake was that I was comparing data from T1 = readtable('xxx.csv') with T2 = readtable('xxx.xlsx') and the numbers were coming in different by 1*eps(...) which wasn't visible even with format('long').

I personally solved the problem by

T1 = varfun(@single, T1);
T2 = varfun(@single, T2);
(T_diff, T_i) = setdiff(T1, T2);