Find one string within another within all cell of an array

Hello everyone,

I have a table (800*10, this table contain various columns with specific information, in column 8 I have a series of dates each row representing a date of the format dd/mm/yyyy. These dates are not in chronological order and I wish to know of many cells belongs to the month of jan,feb,...,dec. So what I have down so far is load the full file in a table using the readtable function and then I have isolated the column 8 creating a single array (800,1). Finally, I tried to use the srtfind function as explianed in http://uk.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/strfind.html, but it is not working... Could anyone help me out please.

Here is the code:

formatspec = '%s%f%f%f%s%s%s%s%s%s';

file_list = readtable('file.txt','Delimiter',',','Format',formatspec);

date_column = file_list(:,3);

jan_cells_location = strfind(date_column,'01/2016');

jan_cells_number = numel(jan_cells);

[Pham Dang]

Your code is a little bit confused : is date_column the same variable as ships_demo_date ? If true, then, the first problem is strfind does not work on variables of class "table". Could you provide a complete minimal working example ?

You can find more information about extracting data from a table here : Access Data in a Table You will see that have used the "Parentheses" type of indexing. You should consider using the "Dot Indexing" type of indexing.

[Arthur Hajaali]

sorry made a mistake in the code the ship_demo_date should have been date_column I have modified it. And thanks for the info that the function strfind does not apply to class "table". Does that mean that I need to load the file in a array rather a table? Or is it possible for me the extract all the row from the table which contain the segment of string "01/2016". Basically I want the program to extract and tell me the number of cells which containt a day the first month of the year 2016 01/01/2016,...,31/01/2016.

Answer 1

[Pham Dang]

Please try to replace

 date_column = file_list(:,3);

by

 date_column = file_list.(3);