Question

Is there a built in MATLAB function to find out if a matrix contains a certain value?
(ala PHP’s in_array())

Answer 1

Many ways to do this. ismember is the first that comes to mind, since it is a set membership action you wish to take. Thus

X = primes(20);
ismember([15 17],X)
ans =
      0    1

Since 15 is not prime, but 17 is, ismember has done its job well here.

Of course, find (or any) will also work. But these are not vectorized in the sense that ismember was. We can test to see if 15 is in the set represented by X, but to test both of those numbers will take a loop, or successive tests.

~isempty(find(X == 15))
~isempty(find(X == 17))

or,

any(X == 15)
any(X == 17)

Finally, I would point out that tests for exact values are dangerous if the numbers may be true floats. Tests against integer values as I have shown are easy. But tests against floating point numbers should usually employ a tolerance.

tol = 10*eps;
any(abs(X - 3.1415926535897932384) <= tol)