regexpcmp (strcmp meets regexp)

Checks whether strings match a regular expression (pattern) or not.

Description

After a year of using cellfun to search for strings matching a regular expression, I developed this function. While it is easy to do in a single line of code, the line looks long and messy, so it is much cleaner and easier to read/understand when using this function. This is useful when you simply care whether the pattern exists in each string, not where it is nor what the actual found match is.

Syntax:
TF = regexpcmp(str,expr)
TF = regexpcmp(str,expr,'ignorecase')

str must be a string or cell array of strings
expr must be a valid regular expression
'ignorecase' option ignores the case of the regular expression

TF is a logical array which is true when a match is found, false otherwise

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.10 (R2010a)