How to Compare strings

Hello,

I need to compare strings and sort in (even in alphabetical order) but without using

the sort code.

I run a code and I get the error message:

Undefined function or method 'gt' for input arguments of type 'cell'.

Error in ==> Untitled3 at 16 if stock(b)>stock(b+1)

Can anyone help on how to solve this or how to compare strings, or how to convert strings to numbers in order to compare them?

Many thanks

Panos

Answer 1

[Jan]

You want to operate on the cell elements, not on scalar cells:

if stock(b) > stock(b+1)
% ==>
if stock{b} > stock{b+1}  % Curly braces!

This works, if both strings have the same length. A conversion to a numerical is not needed. If the strings have different length, pad the shorter one with zeros:

char0 = char(0);
s1 = stock{b};
s2 = stock{b+1};
len1 = length(s1);
len2 = length(s2);
if len1 > len2
  s2 = [s2, char0(1, len1 - len2)];
elseif len2 > len1
  s1 = [s1, char0(1, len2 - len1)];
end
if s1 > s2 ...

Answer 2

[Robert Cumming]

Have you tried:

strcmp

to convert to numbers

str2num

[Pap]

thanks,

I need to sort string alphabetically. So I can't use strcmp.

actually I have a txt file of 6 columns and 100000 rows, saved as six 1x100000 cell arrays. I want to sort all the rows with respect to the first cell array (alphabetically)

Any hint?

[Robert Cumming]

why cant you use sort?