Question

I want to use cellfun function on strfind function to find the index of each string in a cell array of string in another cell array of strings to exclude them from it.

strings = {'aaa','bbb','ccc','ddd','eee','fff','ggg','hhh','iii','jjj'};
excludedStrings = {'b','g','h'};
idx = cellfun('strfind',strings,excludedStrings);
idx = cell2mat = idx;
idx = reshap(idx,numel(idx),1);
idx = unique(idx);
strings(cell2mat(idx)) = [];

There’s error in the cellfun call line, how can I fix this?

Answer 1

Here’s a lovely one-liner:

strings = regexprep(strings, excludedStrings, '');

Breakdown:

• All the words/characters to search for are passed on to regexprep
• This function replaces every occurrence of any word/character in the set given above, with the empty string ('').

It will automatically repeat this action on all elements in the cell-array string.

If you also wish to remove any empty strings from the cell string, do this after the command above:

strings = strings(~cellfun('isempty', strings));