How to find the mode of a string array (no longer works in 2018b)

I have discovered that the following code worked in Matlab 2018a but now throws an error in 2018b:

mode(["A","A","B"],2)

It would appear that the new version of matlab only allows computing the mode on numeric arrays. Is this a bug, or a known change to how this function works (I know that in this version, some of these functions now operate on multiple dimensions now)? And is there a quick workaround? So far I've created the following hack to operate on strings, though I expect it's pretty inefficient:

Y = strings(1,size(X,2));
for n = 1:size(Y,2)
    C = categorical(X(:,n));
    CC = categories(C);
    [~,ind] = max(countcats(C));
    if ~isempty(ind)
        Y(n)=string(CC(ind));
    end
end

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

The documentation for both 2018a and 2018b indicate that the first input to mode() "can be a numeric array, categorical array, datetime array, or duration array." One workaround would be to change your string to a categorical vector.

This works in 2018b

mode(categorical( ["A","A","B"]))
ans = 
  categorical
     A

If needed, you could convert back to a string:

string(mode(categorical( ["A","A","B"])))

[Anil Kamath]

Thanks!

It's a shame this doesn't work using the native mode function on strings, as it means you can't quickly compute the mode in a 2D array along a single dimension without converting each slice into a categorical array one by one, and computing the mode of each categorical slice. It feels like a very natural interpretation for the mode of a string to be the string which occurs most frequently...

[hp]

Thank You...

Answer 2

[Philip Borghesani]

Use a character vector instead of a string array:

 mode(['A','A','B'],2)
% or
 mode('AABBCCC',2)

I belive it was a bug that it worked with strings in R2018a. It has always worked with character vectors and sombody was a bit too helpful adding support for strings which can’t simply be treated as a numeric value.

[Anil Kamath]

I'm afraid this won't work in my use-case as it has to work on multi-character strings rather than just scalar chars (I put a simplified example in my initial question). Adam's answer above looks like it works.