Accepting Multiple String Inputs

Hey! so i'm trying to condense some code i wrote yesterday into something more compact. the first step is just running a while loop that runs a program i made (called stuff.m) if the statement is true. but i want it to be able to accept a big selection of inputs, it's not happy with my choice of "strcmp(elmnt,'fine','good'))". any ideas?

thanks!

 elmnt = input('how are you? ','s'); 
 while (strcmp(elmnt,'fine','good'))
      run stuff
 end

Answer 1

[Iain]

use strcmpi instead, if you want to make sure your user will type those strings as stated. put your "accepted" strings into a cell array:

 Accepted = {'fine','good','great','fantastic','fan-dabby-dozy'};
 while any(strcmpi(elmnt, Accepted))
  run stuff
 end

Look up strfind/findstr/regexp to see if theres a better way of doing what you want to.

[kenny]

it doesn't like the while line but creating the array and the strcmpi were nice catches- thanks. i'll try making this work

[Iain]

Did you use "{" and "}" on the accepted line?

[kenny]

oh! i'm an idiot and misspelled "accepted". i really appreciate your help, thank you.