Usage of strcmpi in embedded strings

suppose you have the following:

A = 'filename.exe'

B.B = 

'whatisthatman.exe'
'nevermind.txt'
'ok.exe'
'\nevermind\filename.exe'

Is it possible to get the index of filename.exe that's embedded in that string with strcmpi?

[Image Analyst]

That's not MATLAB code. Is B.B a cell array? Like this:

B.B = {...
'whatisthatman.exe'
'nevermind.txt'
'ok.exe'
'\nevermind\filename.exe'}

So the "B" field of B is an array of 4 cells, each cell with a different string in it?

[Walter Roberson]

The outer B could be a structure array with 4 entries; then the output would be structure array expansion.

[T]

Yes.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

No, strcmpi() always compares entire strings. "filename.exe" does not occur as the entire string in the 4th entry in B.B, so strcmpi() is not suitable. You will need to use regexp() or strfind()

Are you looking for the index within B(4).B, which would be 12, or are you looking for the index of the entry that contains the string, which would be the 4 ?

cellfun( @(S) ~isempty(strfind(A, S)), {B.B} )

would return [false false false true]

[T]

Basically I want to retrieve the 4th row of B.B using the string in A.

[Walter Roberson]

tf = cellfun( @(S) ~isempty(strfind(A, S)), {B.B} );
B(tf).B

Be careful for the case where there are multiple matches.

Another approach:

T = regexp( {B.B}, ['.*' A '.*'], 'match' );
vertcat(T{:})

The T here would be a cell array that would have [] entries for the lines that do not match. The second line should have the effect of tossing out the [] entries. Again though there would be a problem if there were multiple matching lines.

[T]

B is of class struct but the message I get is

Error using regexp
All cells for regexp must be strings.

There error occurs because I have a row that has

[NaN]

What can I do with this?

[Walter Roberson]

You could change your code so that it does not generate NaN -- e.g., perhaps you could use '' (empty string) instead.

[T]

Is there a way to remove [NaN] from

B.B = {...
'whatisthatman.exe'
'nevermind.txt'
'ok.exe'
'\nevermind\filename.exe'
[NaN]}

I tried using find(strcmpi(B.B,B.B(1))==1)

which works but I have specified the element B.B(1) that I wanted based on the index but I can't do that, it has to be the name ,A = 'filename.exe'.

[Walter Roberson]

Bfixed = {B.B};
Bfixed(isnan(Bfixed)) = {''};
T = regexp( Bfixed, ['.*' A '.*'], 'match' );
vertcat(T{:})

[T]

Bfixed(isnan(Bfixed)) 
Undefined function 'isnan' for input arguments of type 'cell'.