How to efficiently find a string in a cell array

I have a cell array like so

A =

    6×1 cell array

        {'repump locking'  }
        {'unused laser'    }
        {'unused laser'    }
        {'cooler frequency'}
        {'cooler power'    }
        {'repump power'    }

and I which to find the position of the cell containing 'cooler power' for instance.

I now use

ismember(A,'cooler power') 

but it is exceedingly slow for my application. Do you know any faster way to do that ?

Thank you,

Arnaud.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

In theory,

[~, idx] = ismember('cooler power', A);

should be faster. However in my testing it was not clear that it was any faster than

find(ismember(A, 'cooler power'))

What was faster was

find(strcmp(A, 'cooler power'))

or

find(strcmp('cooler power', A))

which I could not reliably distinguish between in timing.