Compare Text
Compare text in character arrays and string arrays in different ways. String arrays were introduced
in R2016b. You can compare string arrays and character vectors with relational operators and with
the strcmp function. You can sort string arrays using the sort function, just as you would sort
arrays of any other type. MATLAB® also provides functions to inspect characters in pieces of text.
For example, you can determine which characters in a character vector or string array are letters or
space characters.
Compare String Arrays for Equality
You can compare string arrays for equality with the relational operators == and ~=. When you
compare string arrays, the output is a logical array that has 1 where the relation is true, and 0 where
it is not true.
Create two string scalars. Starting in R2017a, you can create strings using double quotes.
str1 = "Hello";
str2 = "World";
str1,str2
str1 =
"Hello"
str2 =
"World"
Compare str1 and str2 for equality.
str1 == str2
ans = logical
0
Compare a string array with multiple elements to a string scalar.
str1 = ["Mercury","Gemini","Apollo";...
"Skylab","Skylab B","International Space Station"];
str2 = "Apollo";
str1 == str2
ans = 2x3 logical array
0
0
1
0
0
0
Compare a string array to a character vector. As long as one of the variables is a string array, you can
make the comparison.
chr = 'Gemini';
TF = (str1 == chr)
TF = 2x3 logical array
0
1
0
6 Characters and Strings
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