Comparing two equal strings doesnt work

I have a list of strings (containing hockey player names) and I want to find the index for a specific name.I never had such an easy problem before and it is driving my insane.

I tried this:

player and index are both "Connor McDavid"

player = Player(1);
index1 = string(200);
logic = strcmp(index1 ,player);

Here are screenshots too ensure that they contain the same value.

logic should return a 1 but it returns 0. I tried == too but it doesnt help.

Pls help me, i dont know what to do anymore.

[Walter Roberson]

string(200) is "200" since R2016b unless you have a variable named "string" in scope. If you do then is it a string object or a cell array of character vectors, or a character vector?

[Christian Schumacher]

the badly named variable string contains 886 string entries, so I think it is a character vector. I tried renaming already, it yields the same result.

[Christian Schumacher]

I figured out that it has to do something with the spaces in between the names.

i tried this:

chr = convertStringsToChars(index1)
chr1 = convertStringsToChars(player)

chr == chr1

and i get this result:

ans =

  1×14 logical array

   1   1   1   1   1   1   0   1   1   1   1   1   1   1

so i tried to erase both spaces with something like this:

   index1= strrep(index1,' ','')

but the result is still this:

   index1 = 

    "Connor McDavid"

[Daniel M]

Convert both strings to numbers and tell us what the result it. I'm thinking the space is different. Type this

player + 'A'
index1 + 'A'

Edit: you seem to have solved it while I was writing this. But my hunch was right!

[Christian Schumacher]

this is the answer:

ans = 

    "Connor McDavid0"


ans = 

    "Connor McDavid0"

[Walter Roberson]

player{1}+0
index1{1}+0

You need to extract the characters from the string object to look at the character codes

[Christian Schumacher]

ans =

    67   111   110   110   111   114    32    77    99    68    97   118   105   100


ans =

    67   111   110   110   111   114   160    77    99    68    97   118   105   100

your prediction is indeed correct, the space is different.

What is the most efficient way to erase this problem ?

thank you both for your help!

[Daniel M]

Haha, oh yeah, they are strings.

char(player)-'A'

[Walter Roberson]

160 is U+00A0, "non-breaking space"

player = replace(player, char(160), ' ');
index1 = replace(index1, char(160), ' ');

but it would probably make more sense to replace all of the 160 in your data source (perhaps immediately after retrieving it) instead of doing the replacement each iteration.

Answer 1

[Prasad Parameswaran]

This can be solved by using the "ismember" function, refer the below example:

A = ["John"; "Lee" ; "James"; "Lee"];
B = "Lee";
index = ismember(A,B)

The output is

index =

  4×1 logical array

   0
   1
   0
   1