MATLAB: Am I not able to use the INTERSECTION, ISMEMBER and UNION functions with the ‘rows’ flag when applying them to a cell array of strings in MATLAB 7.2 (R2006a)

MATLAB

I would like to have the ability to use the ISMEMBER, UNION and INTERSECT functions on cell arrays of strings with the 'rows' flag.

The ability to use the ISMEMBER, UNION or INTERSECT functions with the 'rows' flag on a cell arrays of strings is not available in MATLAB.

To work around this issue, use STRVCAT to create an array of strings and use ISMEMBER, INTERSECT or UNION on that array instead of the cell array.

The ability to process empty cells directly with the UNIQUE function is not available in MATLAB 7.9 (R2009b).

As a workaround, you can identify which cells are not empty with the CELLFUN function:

c = {'hello', 'world', [], 'hello', 'MATLAB'}
~cellfun(@isempty, c)

Then use this logical array to index into the original cell array in order to call UNIQUE on only the elements of the cell array which are not empty:

unique(c(~cellfun(@isempty, c)))

You can use a real handy function called ismember() to test elements of A against elements of B. Then it's just a matter of indexing:

in = ismember(A,B);
C = nan(size(A));
C(in) = A(in);