Remove duplicate cells from cell array of different dimensions

Hi,

I have a cell array C of nx1, where each cell contains a vector of different values. Each vector has a different length, ranging from 3 to 8 or so. I would like to output another cell array, where all the duplicate cells in C have been removed. I also don't care about the order of the values within each vector. I suppose I could run a giant for loop (in this case n = 900) where I sort each vector with the cells of C and somehow use that.

I've looked up other similar questions online, but the only answers I've found so far only work if the dimensions of C are constant. My only other guess is that maybe I will have to convert it into an array, where there are Nans for the cells whose vectors are not long enough.

Does someone else spot a solution?

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

A=arrayfun(@(x) randi(10,1,randi([3 8])),1:900,'un',0); % Example
b=cellfun(@(x) sort([x nan(1,8-numel(x))]),A,'un',0)
c=cell2mat(b'')
[~,jj]=unique(c,'rows');
B=A(jj)

[Tyler]

Sorry, this does not work when I try it. B outputs a single cell of the first cell of A.

While I don't understand every step, one problem might be that the Nans seem to disappear between b and c. c appears to be a long vector, when it was intended to be an array in order to use unique along the rows...

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

You can post a short example and explain what you want