Find unique combinations of double and character elements

I have a cell type variable with 3 columns and 500000 rows, here is an example:

     c1    c2    c3
  A={1994 'AACE' 2071
  1994  'AACE'  30677
  1994  'AAC'  1541
  1994  'AAC'  2027
  1994  'AAC'  7843}

I am applying the following code:

%Unique combinations of c1 and c2 
[y,~,ind] = unique([num2str(c1) c2], 'rows'); %Problem

%Count occurences
c = accumarray(ind,1);

%Final variable
F = [y c];

But it gives me an error in the first row, because I am trying to find unique combinations of 'double' and 'char' elements. Can someone help me? Thanks

[Yu Jiang]

Hi Maria

It would be easier to help you if you could show the exact error message.

-Yu

[Maria]

Hi Yu,

it gives this error: Error using horzcat Dimensions of matrices being concatenated are not consistent.

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

   A={1994 'AACE' 2071
  1994  'AACE'  30677
  1994  'AAC'  1541
  1994  'AAC'  2027
  1994  'AAC'  7843};
c12=cellfun(@(x,y) [num2str(x) y],A(:,1),A(:,2),'un',0);
[y,ii,ind] = unique(c12) %Problem
c = accumarray(ind,1);
F = [A(ii,:)  num2cell(c)]

Answer 2

[Andrei Bobrov]

[y0,~,ii] = unique(A(:,2));
[y,~,i0] = unique([cell2mat(A(:,1)),ii],'rows')
F = [num2cell(y(:,1)),y0,num2cell(accumarray(i0,1))];

[Maria]

It gives the following error: Error using horzcat Dimensions of matrices being concatenated are not consistent.

Answer 3

[Yu Jiang]

I believe both the answers by Andrei Bobrov and Azzi Abdelmalek are correct. The error message should be caused by your original definition of A. If you create A exactly as Azzi does, then there should be no problem.

By the way, they both use the function cellfun, which is very convenient for cell operations. More details can be found here (Documentation) .