How to speed up searching for all items in cell array within another cell array

Hi, I have some code which is taking ages to run.

I have 2 cell arrays of strings called:

"TBOM_PartNo" which is 7252 rows, and 3 columns.

"BoMExplosion_PartNo" which is 45567 rows, and 3 columns.

I need to find on what row every entry in TBOM_PartNo resides in BoMExplosion_PartNo. All 3 strings need to match.

They look like this: TBOM_PartNo(1:5,:)

ans =

    'FK72'    '142'     'AA' 
    'FK72'    '142'     'BA' 
    'FK72'    '142'     'BA' 
    'EX'      '186'     'AA' 
    'UH12'    '0069'    'DBA'

So i'm looking for a vector of integers equal in length to TBOM_PartNo (7353) that contains the row numbers where that entry in TBOM_PartNo can be found in BoMExplosion_PartNo.

At the moment I'm just looping through TBOM_PartNo and using ismember at each loop, which takes forever:

for i = 1 : length(TBOM_PartNo)

    CurrentPartNo = TBOM_PartNo(i,:);

    ThreeColumnLogic = ismember(BoMExplosion_PartNo,CurrentPartNo); %logical for each column
    [A,RowNo] = max(sum(ThreeColumnLogic,2));   %find match in all three columns

    AllRows = [AllRows; RowNo];
end

Answer 1

[Titus Edelhofer]

Hi, the fastest usually is to concatenate the strings, i.e.,

TBOM = strcat(TBOM_PartNo(:,1), TBOM_PartNo(:,2), TBOM_PartNo(:,3));
BoM = strcat(...); % do the same
rows = ismember(TBOM, BoM);

Titus

[Gregory]

This just gives a logical yes or no as to if each name in TBOM exists in BoM, I need the actual row number.

Regards, Greg

[Titus Edelhofer]

Please try to use the second output of ismember for the location (or find(rows))...