Question

I have a cell array of numbers but the majority of the cell array is empty for example:

x = 

[]    [6]    []    [4]    []    []    []    [1]

I have a matching array y

y = [1, 3,1,5,7,3,1,5]

I want to get the index of the numbers from the cell array x and use them to get the corresponding values from y. So x(2) matches with y(2). I convert x to a array using

x = cell2mat(x); 

But the problem is that it returns

x = [6,4,1]

This does not allow me to get the correct index so I can then sort X and then sort Y accordingly so the same indices match up. I tried to use sort that does not work for cell arrays.

Answer 1

Just use y(x); that will return indices 6, 4, and 1 from the y vector.

Note that the order of the returned matrix will depend on the order of the indices in x; if you want to sort x, do it before running y(x).