String starting with letter 's' from cell array

I have a cell array a = {'sa_dfa','soft_df1','sock_dd2','saz_dfa_d2','suu_f'}

How to extract only the string starting with letter 's' but need to exclude the string starting with soft and sock

so a = {'sa_dfa',[],[],'saz_dfa_d2','suu_f'}

How can I do this?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

As per Stalin's answer you can use strncmp and related with logical operators:

a(strncmp(a, 's', 1) & ~strncmp(a, 'sock', numel('sock')) & ~strncmp(a, 'soft', numel(sock)))

Or you can use a regular expression:

a(~cellfun(@isempty, regexp(a, '^s(?!ock|oft)')))

The above regular expression matches any string that starts with 's' not followed by 'ock' or 'oft'.