Index of value when you want to check multiple elements at the same time between 2 cell arrays

Hello,

I have an M-by-1 cell array, A and a N-by-1 cell array B. I would like to find the indices where each entry of B can be found in A. However, the only way I have gotten my approach to work is looking for a specific entry of B at a time within a loop. I suspect that there is a way to do this without the loop but I am not sure how.

Also, any elements that are in B but are not in A should provide an empty cell. My poor attempt at solving this is below:

A = {'Mary'; 'had'; 'a'; 'little'; 'lamb'};
B = {'Mary'; 'lamb'; 'ary'};
 
idx = find(ismember(A,B))

Answer 1

[Dave B]

If I understand the quesiton, you want to find indices in A where the values in B are found when they are in A.

You can use the second output of ismember for this, it'll return a 0 for items that aren't found:

A = {'Mary'; 'had'; 'a'; 'little'; 'lamb'};
B = {'Mary'; 'lamb'; 'ary'};
[~,idx] = ismember(B,A)

idx = 3×1

1 5 0

Worth pointing out that B might be in A more than once, ismember will return the first place it's found (the documentation says this is 'Generally' true, though I'm not sure I can think of a case where it's not):

A = {'Mary'; 'had'; 'a'; 'little'; 'Mary'};
B = {'Mary';'little';'sheep'};
[~,idx] = ismember(B,A)

idx = 3×1

1 4 0

[dsmalenb]

Thank you @Dave B for this answer. I just needed a little nudge in the right direction. :)