How can I see if one cell also exists in another cell array?

Hello Matlab Community,

I have one 640x1 cell array (some cells are empty) and one 1280x1 cell array. Now, I would like to know how many of the words in the 640x1 cell array also appear in the 1280x1 cell array. Inside the cells are words ordered from Z-A. I have already played around with "==", "isequal" and "strcmp", but could not find a solution that works. In Excel I have solved it with "=SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIF(A2:A?;B2:B?). This always required to select the relevant filled cells and I would like to move the whole analysis over to MATLAB.

Is there a script that can do that, or do I have to stick to Excel? Is would be superb if that script would also ignore empty cells, so I do not have to select the cell array each time.

All the best, Luca

Answer 1

[KSSV]

You can remove the empty cells using :

A = A(~cellfun('isempty',A)) ; whre A is your cell array

Two compare the two cell arrays you can use functions like setdiff, intersect in MATLAB.

Answer 2

[Stephen23]

Have a look at this simple example, which shows how many strings of A are in B:

>> A = {'cat','in','the','hat'};
>> B = {'cat','fat','hat','rat','sat','tat'};
>> nnz(ismember(A,B))
ans =  2