How can I return a value from an excel spreadsheet based on multiple user input variables?

Hello! I am a beginner in MATLAB and I'm having trouble figuring out the best way of going about writing a particular program.

Basically, I'm trying to write a program that will return the closest matching recipe from an excel spreadsheet based on user input on available ingredients, cost, and time. I'm not sure how to traverse through and filter out the closest match based on several variables.

The spreadsheet is attached for referene.

I want to be able to output a recipe name as well as a link to the closest matching recipe based on the three aforementioned user input variables of ingredients, cost, and time by comparing them to the values on the spreadsheet.

[Stephen23]

@Mwajuma: please upload a sample data file by clicking the paperclip button. We cannot import screenshots of data.

[Mwajuma]

I will do that.

[Rik]

What did you try so far? Do you know how to read an excel file? Do you know how to collect user input?

[Mwajuma]

To answer the last two questions, yes I know how to read and upload and excel file, but no I'm not entirely sure how the best way to take user input would be. I uploaded the excel sheet like so

data = readtable('recipedataset.xlsx','PreserveVariableNames',true);

And then to take user input the best way I could think to do it would be like so:

userIngredients = input("List available ingredients (seperate using commas): ");

userCost = input("Enter maximum available time to cook (in minutes): ");

userTime = input("Enter maximum cost (in USD): ");

Or something along those lines.

[Rik]

Typing is very sensitive to errors and is fairly slow. You might consider a list of checkboxes or a uilistbox. That way the user can select the ingredients they have available. You can form the list of ingredients by splitting the lists in your table and using unique. You can then use ismember to check if the available ingredients match a recipe.

For general advice and examples for how to create a GUI (and avoid using GUIDE), have look at this thread.

You should also avoid input without the 's' switch, since it allows executing arbitrary code. Try writing exit as one of the inputs to see what I mean.

[Stephen23]

In addition to the other comments: rather than assuming exactly equivalent strings (which given real-world data is very unlikely) you should probably check for string edit distance or some other metric of how similar the strings are:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/textanalytics/ref/editdistance.html

You will also have to consider that the ingredients might be listed in different orders.

Answer 1

[Austin M. Weber]

Here is an example of how you can ask the user to select from a list of ingredients rather type the ingredient names manually:

% Read data from Excel file
data = readtable('recipedataset.xlsx','PreserveVariableNames',true);

% Extract the data from the ingredients column
ingredients = data.ingredients;

% Create separate string array from each row, split the strings by
% commas and then concatenate everything into one variable
all_ingredients = string(); % Preallocate array
for i = 1 : size(ingredients,1)
    row2string = string(ingredients(i));
    stringSplit = strsplit(row2string,', ')';
    all_ingredients = [all_ingredients; stringSplit];
end

% Remove any duplicate ingredients and convert to cell array
unique_ingredients = cellstr(unique(all_ingredients));

% Ask user to select their ingredients from a list
idx = listdlg('ListString',unique_ingredients);

The last function (listdlg) creates a dialoge box where the user can select any number of the ingredients from the table. To select more than one ingredient, the user will have to hold down the CTRL key while selecting ingredients.

Once the ingredients are selected, you can check which recipes in the original table contain the selected ingredients:

% Construct a list of the ingredients chosen by the user
selected_ingredients = unique_ingredients(idx);

% Loop through each recipe to count how many of the chosen ingredients are contained in
% each recipe
recipe_matrix = zeros(length(data.ingredients),length(selected_ingredients));
for j = 1:length(selected_ingredients)
    temp = contains(data.ingredients,selected_ingredients);
    recipe_matrix(:,j) = temp;
end
% Sum recipe_matrix row-wise to get the total number of matching
% ingredients per recipe
recipe_matches = sum(recipe_matrix,2);

% Identify which recipes' ingredients lists contain the most matches to the
% user selections
max_matches = max(recipe_matches);
most_matches = find(recipe_matches == max_matches);

After this step, the variable most_matches contains the index position of the row(s) in the table data containing the highest number of ingredients from the user selections. To extract these rows, simply use most_matches to index into the table:

% Closest matching recipe(s) based on selected ingredients:
possible_recipes = data(most_matches,:);

If there is more than one possible recipe, you can have the user specify the time and cost and then use those inputs to reduce the recipe list further. I hope this helps!