I am having an issue using strcmp when there is a single string in my cell array

Question

Ryan 2013-9-21

Hello all!

I am having an issue using strcmp and I was wondering if maybe someone could help. I have a vector called L that looks like:

L = {'Aja',[],[],[],[], ... []};

with 46 empty entries. Then I have a list of words called U that looks like:

U = {string1, string2, ... ,'Aja', ..., stringN};

so U is a unique list of strings and the word in position L{1} is for sure in U, where in my case U{88} = 'Aja'. However when I do

strcmp(L,U{88})

returns a vector of 47 zeros. The first entry should for sure be one. Then when I do

strcmp(L{1},U{88})

it returns a 1 as it should. Does anyone know why this is happening? I need to be able to return the correct vector,

v = [1, 0 ,0 , 0 ...., 0];

Thank you for your help in advance.

Answer 1

Walter Roberson 2013-9-21

Use strcmp to compare each element in a cell array of strings to the corresponding element in a second cell array of strings.

So you are using it incorrectly. Perhaps you want ismember()