matching texts in two cell arrays

I have two cell arrays, one longer than the other. Both containing strings. The shorter cell array contain only part of a name of one of the cell in the longer cell array. Can I match each individual cells in the shorter cell arrays to find the index of the full name in the cell array. for example;

shortcellarray = {'Micheal' 'John' 'Eric'};
longcellarray  = {'Lisa Ann' 'Michael Adams' 'Art Vara' 'Brian Burns' 'Eric Holmes'};

how do I get the index of the long array from the match of short array (without loop iteration, which I know can be done with strfind on each cell within the shortarray)? The answer should be:

index = {2, [], 5}

Thanks.

Answer 1

[Michael Haderlein]

I'm totally sure that much better solutions will be given, but one reads as:

index = cellfun(@(a) strmatch(a,longcellarray),shortcellarray,'uniform',false)
index = 

      [2]    [0x1 double]    [5]

Best regards, Michael

[Michael Haderlein]

(I fixed the first value of shortcellarray to "Michael" instead of "Micheal")

[Quy]

This works great for me.

Thanks for the respond. I think cellfun function looks very useful, and I need to get better at using it.

Thanks.

Answer 2

[Joseph Cheng]

you can do this

shortcellarray = {'Michael' 'John' 'Eric'};
longcellarray  = {'Lisa Ann' 'Michael Adams' 'Art Vara' 'Brian Burns' 'Eric Holmes'};

for ind =1:length(shortcellarray)
    IndexC = strfind(longcellarray, cell2mat(shortcellarray(ind)));
    Index{1,ind} = find(not(cellfun('isempty', IndexC)));

end

the strfind works within cells.

[Quy]

Using a loop would definitely work, and that is what i have, but I was looking for a better way to do this.

Thanks.