It isn't working because cmnt1(i,1) is a sub-table of the table cmnt1 that contains one cell of cmnt1. You want to refer to the contents of the cell directly, so use curly brace indexing:
cmnt0 = {'obs1';'obs2';'obs3';'obs4'};
curve=[1;2;3;2];
cmnt1 = table(cmnt0,curve,'VariableNames',{'obs','Curve'})
% introduce a third column for demonstration:
cmnt1.Curve_2 = [5;6;7;8]
for i=[1,2,3,4]
% x=strcmp(cmnt1(i,1),'obs1')
x=strcmp(cmnt1{i,1},'obs1')
if x==1
%% some code here after that
output = cmnt1{i,2:end} % do this to store the contents of the cells in columns 2 to the end (which are all numeric), or
output = cmnt1{i,2} % do this to store the contents of the cell in column 2
end
end
You can do the same thing without a loop, using logical indexing, which is intended to also handle the situation where the string you are matching occurs more than once in the first column of the table:
% introduce a second 'obs1':
cmnt1{3,1} = {'obs1'}
is_match = strcmp(cmnt1{:,1},'obs1')
output_array = cmnt1{is_match,2:end}
output_subtable = cmnt1(is_match,2:end)
