MATLAB: Within a cell array, how can I look for cells that contain a certain element, in addition to other elements I am not looking for

Question

For example, let's say I have a cell array:

Z={'abcde','atg';'va','rem';5,'a'}.

I want to find the positions (x,y) of all the cells that contain the letter 'a', among other letters that are in the same cell as well (I don't want to split the cell into 1 letter cells and then use strcmp).

Thanks

Answer 1

Do you really have a numeric value in one of the cell of your cell array?

Anyway, strfind is the function you want

%only deal with strings 
zwithonlystrings = Z(cellfun(@ischar, Z));
aposition = strfind(zwithonlystrings, 'a');
%if you want the result, the same shape as z:
aposinz = cell(size(Z));
aposinz(cellfun(@ischar, Z)) = aposition