strcmp help

How would i strcmp two character strings with different numbers of rows? Also how can i display what the differences are between the two rows?

[Sven]

Please give an example.

Are these strings with newlines, or are these cell arrays of strings?

[Abra dog]

these are cell arrays of strings

for example i have 30 objects on one string and 33 objects on the other string. I want to compare these two using strcmp and then show which ones didn't match

[Fangjun Jiang]

Then ismember(),intersect() or setdiff() may be useful.

ismember({'a','b'},{'a','c','ab'})

intersect({'a','b'},{'a','c','ab'})

setdiff({'a','b'},{'a','c','ab'})

Answer 1

[Sven]

Like Fangjun said, ismember(),intersect() or setdiff() may be useful.

% Make a cell array of 10 short strings
firstSet = cellstr(char(randi(26,10,4)+96));
% And a second array using some of the first set mixed with other randoms
secondSet = cat(1, firstSet([2,7,9]), cellstr(char(randi(26,10,4)+96)));
% Randomise the order of this second set
secondSet = secondSet(randperm(length(secondSet)));

% Find matches
[firstMatch, firstMatchLocs] = ismember(firstSet,secondSet);
cell2print = cat(1, firstSet(firstMatch)', num2cell([find(firstMatch)'; firstMatchLocs(firstMatch)']));
fprintf('(%s), found at first index %d matches second index %d\n', cell2print{:})
fprintf('The following firstSet entries did not match the secondSet:\n')
cell2print = cat(1, firstSet(~firstMatch)', num2cell(find(~firstMatch)'));
fprintf('(%s) at index %d\n', cell2print{:})

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

By definition, a character string only has one row.

If there is more than one row, you have a character array (or column vector.)

If you have two character arrays with the same width and the same number of rows, then

all(A==B,2)

will give you column vector of truth values of whether the rows match each other.

If you have two character arrays with different widths, then some would say that the two are never equal (because at the very least the number of trailing blanks would be different), and some would say that trailing blanks should be ignored (note: strcmp() explicitly includes trailing blanks!)

If you want to ignore trailing blanks and you have the same number of rows, then

cellfun(@isequal, cellstr(A), cellstr(B))

[Abra dog]

what if the width is the same but the number of rows don't match?