match on a string

I have a phone book directory with country codes for all the countries in the format

       a = {
              886  TW  
              992    TJ  
              255  TZ  
              66  TH 
              690  TK  
              676  TO  
              1868  TT 
              216  TN  
              90    TR  
              993  TM  
              1649  TC}

I have another data with arbitrary country codes like

             scode=[90 992 216]

I want to match the data such that my output is

               xxx= 90 TR
                    992 TJ
                    216 TN

I wrote a code but it does not seem to work for the character strings

        clc
        clear
        [~,~, a]=  xlsread('D:\Country-codes.xls','a','C3:D271');
        scode=  xlsread('D:\COP 18.xlsx','Sheet3','A2:A401');
        t=str2num((a(:,2));
        scode=scode';

    bsxfun(@minus,t(:,1),scode);
    [~,minRow] = min(abs(bsxfun(@minus,t(:,1),scode)));
    xxx = [ scode.', t(minRow,2:end) ];

Answer 1

[Matt J]

This would be a good application of a container.Map

map=container.Map([a{:,1}],[a{:,2}]);

xxx=arrayfun(@(i) map(i), scode(:),'uni',0);

Answer 2

[Stephen23]

Putting numeric data into a cell array makes it harder to process. Converting to numeric using str2double is reccomended rather than using str2num. Once you put those numeric scalars into a numeric vector then this task is trivial using ismember:

a = {...
      '886'  'TW'
      '992'  'TJ'
      '255'  'TZ'
      '66'  'TH'
      '690'  'TK'
      '676'  'TO'
      '1868'  'TT'
      '216'  'TN'
      '90'  'TR'
      '993'  'TM' 
      '1649'  'TC'};
scode = [90,992,216];
[~,idx] = ismember(scode,str2double(a(:,1)))
out = a(idx,:)

giving:

out =
   '90'  'TR'
  '992'  'TJ'
  '216'  'TN'