MATLAB: Vectorizing multiple string comparison

Question

Is there a way to significantly speed up this loop, perhaps by vectorizing it? Inputs in attachment. I do not have a Matlab version with "string" functions.

d = a';
for i = 1:numel(a)
    d{i} = c(strcmp(a{i}, b), :);
end

I tried working my way from the inner part with cellfun, but either I am not getting it right or it is not the good approach:

aux = cellfun(@strcmp, a, b); % does not work

Answer 1

One obvious minor speed-up is to get rid of the find that serves absolutely no purpose. You can directly use the logical vector returned by strcmp:

d{i} = c(strcmp(a{i}, b)), :);

For some reason, I cannot load your mat file. I'm going to assume that a is a cell array of string, and so is b (otherwise the loop would not be needed). Assuming that there are no repeated strings in b:

assert(numel(unique(b)) == numel(b), 'This code does not work when there are duplicate values in b');
d = cell(size(a))';
[isfound, loc] = ismember(a, b);
d(isfound) = c(loc(isfound), :);

If it's guaranteed that all elements of a are found in b, then you can simplify even further to:

assert(numel(unique(b)) == numel(b), 'This code does not work when there are duplicate values in b');
[isfound, loc] = ismember(a, b);
assert(all(isfound), 'The next line only works if all elements of a are in b');
d = num2cell(c(loc, :), 2);