Reading user input when input is a combination of letters?

I'm writing an mfile that asks the user to input different letter codes (for example, ABC or BAC or CBA, etc), and depending on that letter combination, go to different functions or mfiles or do different things. How would I be able to read that in matlab? Below is basically what I'm doing so far:

prompt = 'Please input letter code:';
inp = input(prompt);
if inp == CBA
    fprintf('answer is 1');
elseif inp == BAC
    fprintf('answer is 0');
end

etc. But when I run something like this on MATLAB, it is giving me an error when the letters are input, saying " undefined function or variable BAC", etc. How can I avoid this happening and actually make matlab read the letter inputs?

Answer 1

[David Goodmanson]

Hi Stenila,

You need to get the user input as a string using the 's' option, not the usual input. Right now Matlab thinks that BAC must be the name of a function or variable, as it says. Once inp is a string you can compare it to 'BAC' :

prompt = 'Please input letter code:';
inp = input(prompt,'s');
if strcmp(inp,'CBA')
    fprintf('answer is 1');
elseif strcmp(inp,'BAC');
    fprintf('answer is 0');
end

If you want a case-insensitive string comparison, use strcmpi.

[Ralph Segi]

Thank you, it helped me! :-)

[Alishba Zafar]

Please tell me about user dependent character choice??