MATLAB: Find matching rows of cell arrays containing strings

Question

Hi,

I am working with a pair of cell arrays, containing strings. The cell arrays are of the same size, and they contain the same rows, but in different order. E.g.:

A = {'ABC' '123'; 'A' '100'; 'C' '0'};
B = {'A' '100'; 'C' '0'; 'ABC' '123'};

It will always be the case that the rows are simply ordered differently. What I am trying to accomplish is to find this ordering. That is, row 1 in A becomes row 3 in B, row 2 in A becomes row 1 in B, and row 3 in A becomes row 2 in B. So I need some sort of output like:

output = [3 2 1]

or something containing the same kind of information. I just need to know how the rows are permuted. I've tried using cellfun with ismember and so on, but I can't seem to make that handle rows, as opposed to cell by cell. I've also tried converting A and B into arrays numbers (because it's my impression that it's easier to deal with numbers than strings), but then I run into the problem that not all the cells have the same size, so there's a concatenating error.

In short, I've tried a bunch of different cellfun's with strfind, ismember, etc., but I haven't found a method that works for rows specifically.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

B=circshift(A,[-1 0])

Edit

A = {'ABC' '123'; 'A' '100'; 'C' '0'};
B = {'A' '100'; 'C' '0'; 'ABC' '123'}
[n,m]=size(A);
[~,idx]=ismember(A(:),B(:));
[ii,jj]=ind2sub([n m],idx);
output=ii(1:n)';