MATLAB: Using strcmp on nested cell array (cell array within a cell array)

cell arraycellfunfind stringstrcmp

I need to retrieve the index of a string within a cell array where some cells are strings and others are cell arrays of different sizes. For example the first 5 rows might look like this:
    {1×2 cell}
    {'Text1' }
    {1×2 cell}
    {'Text2' }
    {1×5 cell}
How do I retrieve the row index when the string might be contained with the cell arrays? I'd like to do this without a loop and I'm sure there's a way but I can't figure it out and can't seem to find an answer anywhere. I've tried cellfun which works if I was searching for 'Text1' for example.

Best Answer

I'm not entirely clear if you want to look inside the inner cell arrays or not.
If not:
lookup = 'something';
rows = find(cellfun(@(c) ischar(c) && strcmp(c, lookup), yourcellarray))  %the && is essential to ensure that strcmp is only called when the content of the cell is a char vector
If you want to look insie the inner cell arrays and only care about knowing which rows of the outer cell array may contain your search:
lookup = 'something';
rows = find(cellfun(@(c) any(strcmp(c, lookup)), yourcellarray))
Note that this assumes that the inner cells all contain char vectors.
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