How do I iterate through excel cells?

Hey Matlab Fam,

I'm trying to update an inventory file and read in an excel file but the xlsread function shows all strings as NaN values (unfortunately some item codes are strings). I need to be able to compare values from 2 columns in different excel files and they have strings. When I use the [num,txt,raw] method, the if statement with the == operator doesn't work and shows:

Undefined operator '==' for input arguments of type 'cell'.

If I change from parentheses to curvy brackets, {}, the == operator works but then the message shows:

Matrix dimensions must agree.

For the code below, I imported the inventory_file and file1 and created 2 arrays: inventory_file_sku and file1_sku. I need to import file1's quantities into an array with the corresponding row number as the items in inventory_file_sku. file1 has more products than inventory_file so I need to pick the right ones from file1.

new_qty = [];

for i = 1:989
    for j = 1:7083
        if file1_sku{j,1} == inventory_file_sku{i,1}
            new_qty(i) = file1_qty{j};
        end
    end
end

Can someone help? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

[Seth Furman]

In general, the use of xlsread is not recommended. Please consider using readtable, readmatrix, or readcell instead.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2019b/matlab/ref/readtable.html

Note that readtable allows you to supply import options to specify the format of the file you are trying to read.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2019b/matlab/ref/readtable.html#btx_238-1_sep_btx_238-1-opts

In order to determine if two strings or character arrays are equal, you can use the strcmp function.

>> strcmp('dog','snake')

ans =

  logical

   0

https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2019b/matlab/ref/strcmp.html