Question

I need to convert a column in 2 matrices to the same datatype so that I can run ismember. One column is in matrix [] format and the other is in string format i.e. we need to match [2000] with '2000'. Please see:

    mat1 = {'aa' [2001] ; 'ex' [10] ; 'ex' [1001]  ; 'rt' [4001] ;} ;
    mat2 = {'abc' '10' ; 'def' '4001' ; 'ghi' '2001' ; } ;

ismember(cell2mat(mat1(:,2)), cell2mat(mat2(:,2))) % Gives ERROR

%cell2mat(mat1(:,2) works just fine
%cell2mat(mat2(:,2)) is the PROBLEM.  

%Final answer
    ans = {...
     'aa' [2001] 'ghi'; 'ex' [10] 'abc'; 'ex' [1001] 'abc'; 'rt' [4001] 'def';} ;

Shall appreciate a vectorized code, if possible.

Answer 1

If you know that all of the second column of mat2 is going to be strings, you could convert them to numbers like so:

mat2(:,2) = cellfun(@str2num, mat2(:,2), 'UniformOutput', false)

Iterating through would also work, particularly if you’re not sure they’re all strings:

for i=1:size(mat2,1)
    if ischar(mat2{i,2})
        mat2{i,2} = str2num(mat2{i,2});
    end
end