Find cell containing part of a string

I would like to find the elements of a cell array that contain part of a specified string.

colorList = {'Red', 'Green', 'Blue', 'Purple'}; % List of values to match with
stringToCheck = 'Blue 23948723'; % String we are trying to match

I would like to return index=3 of colorList since that entry contains the stringToCheck text of 'Blue'. How can I do this?

Answer 1

[Cedric]

If you cannot assume that keywords are separated by white spaces:

 >> find(cellfun(@(x)~isempty(strfind(stringToCheck,x)), colorList))
 ans =
     3

[KAE]

They may not be, I hadn't thought of that so thanks.

[Cedric]

My pleasure!

Answer 2

[per isakson]

>> find( ismember( colorList, strsplit( stringToCheck ) ) )
ans =
     3

or

>> find( ismember( colorList, strsplit( stringToCheck, {'\s','\.',','} ... 
       , 'CollapseDelimiters',true, 'DelimiterType','RegularExpression' ) ) )
ans =
     3

if the color name is followed by a period or comma, e.g. "Blue.". And what about upper and lower case, e.g "blue"? And "Bluetooth"?

[KAE]

Thank you, this works and your scenarios are useful too.

Answer 3

[Akira Agata]

If your MATLAB is R2016b or later version, you can use contains function, like:

idx = cellfun(@(x) contains(stringToCheck,x),colorList);

The answer is:

>> colorList(idx)
ans =
  {'Blue'}

[KAE]

Thank you, this syntax is easier to read and thus remember than then other ones.