Error using ismember for two cell arrays

attached two cell arrays that I am using in my analysis. When I use in a loop:

ismember(StateName2,StateName1(i))

I receive error: Error using cell/ismember Input A of class cell and input B of class cell must be cell arrays of character vectors, unless one is a character vector.

any help is appreciated

[Stephen23]

Both of those cell arrays contain scalar structures in each cell, where all of the structures have the same fields. This is an inefficient way to store that data: it would be much simpler to access if these were non-scalar structures, so the first thing that we will do is convert from these superfluous cell arrays and combine into simpler structure arrays:

>> SN1 = cat(1,StateName1{:});
>> SN2 = cat(1,StateName2{:});

At this point we can see that each non-scalar structure has the same fields:

>> fieldnames(SN1)
ans =
MCOS
string
>> fieldnames(SN2)
ans =
MCOS
string

The string field is always empty:

>> any(~cellfun('isempty',{SN1.string}))
        ans = 0
>> any(~cellfun('isempty',{SN2.string}))
        ans = 0

Whereas the MCOS field is always a six element column vector:

>> find(~cellfun(@iscolumn,{SN1.MCOS}))
ans = []
>> find(~cellfun(@iscolumn,{SN2.MCOS}))
ans = []

It is not clear from your question how you expect to compare these arrays, but at this point you have several choices, such as using isequal in a loop, or perhaps concatenating into numeric matrices, transposing, and then comparing the rows:

>> mat1 = cat(2,SN1.MCOS).';
>> mat2 = cat(2,SN2.MCOS).';
>> find(ismember(mat2,mat1,'rows'))
ans = []
>> find(ismember(mat1,mat2,'rows'))
ans = []

None of the MCOS field values (i.e. column vectors) exist in the other structure array, so it is not clear what you expect to obtain from this comparison.

Answer 1

[KSSV]

Try:

s1 = [StateName1{:}]' ;
s2 = [StateName2{:}]' ;
idx = ismember(s2,s1) ;