making a vector of cells

i have a project making a GUI i work on

my GUI has to open a CSV file that had 5000+ rows of info about countries and allow the user to plot info by choise

for example - choose USA, then plot popolation and birthrate (as X and Y)

in my CVS the first column is country, when i read it with readtable i have it as cells that have a string.

i want to create a short vector that only have the names once to use it in my Popupmenu as the list of countries

how can i poll the info easily once to a cell vectore that i can later use as a long string?

thank you!

Answer 1

[dpb]

Probably good choice would be to convert the country string/column in the table into a categorical variable; makes for looking for a match simpler than using string comparisons by the "==" operator, for example.

To create the list for your UI,

countriesList=unique(tYourTable.Country);

This will give you an alphabetically-sorted list automagically.

[Rotem Stahl]

first of all, thank you! i did not know this function existed!

a follow up question, if i may -

i am now trying to make the cell array be what you see in the popupmenu of the GUI

set(handle.country_menu,'string',countriesList);

gives me an answer:

The class handle has no property or method named 'country_menu'.

do you know what am i doing wrong?

thank you!

Rotem