Cannot find string in table matlab

I am trying to find this string "[phone]" in a the table namesnumbers as can be seen in the picture,it exists in the table though it returns 0 in the specific place where it exists.the line i used is

IndexC = strfind(namesnumbers{:,:},string(newnum)  );

When i tried contains not a variable it did find the index though as a specific number

IndexC = strfind(namesnumbers{:,:},"[phone]" );

What am I doing wrong?

link to the excel sheets:

https://www.transfernow.net/dl/20210719GmyiVZBY/MoeMJdfv

the code:

finalnames=readtable("names1example.xlsx");
     m1="101.xlsx";    
     t=readtable(m1);
     m=t(4:end,:);
     
    [size1,~]=size(t);
 
    numbers=t(:,3);
    namesnumbers=finalnames(:,3);
    for k=3:size1
       number= numbers{k,1};
   
     IndexC = strfind(namesnumbers{:,:},string(number)  );
    
    Index = find(not(cellfun('isempty',IndexC)));
    gender=finalnames(Index,2);
    name=finalnames(Index,1);
       end
    
     
    t(:,4)= (name);
    
    t(:,5)= (gender);
    t(:,6:end)=m;
    m2=append("H",m1);
    writetable(t,m2);

[2]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/zumqE.png

[Peter Perkins]

Tomer, there's something funny going in your code. strfind returns a vector of indices, yet you are passing that to cellfun. That can't be right.

In addition, you have a table with only one variable in it. There' not much point in that, you may as well just extract the one variable. As, I think, text. I'd recommend a string array, not a cell array of char rows.

Answer 1

[Hrishikesh Borate]

Hi,

Modifying the assignment of variable IndexC can be a possible approach to find the string in the table.

IndexC = cellfun(@(s) strfind(number{1}, s),namesnumbers{:,:},'UniformOutput',false);

For more information, refer cellfun.