quickest way to scan excel column for keyword

say I have an excel column looks something like this:

bacon cooked

3

egg boiled

1

potato fried

30

whats the quikest way to scan the column for the keyword "bacon" and return the cell after it (3) as output?

Thank you!

Answer 1

[Peng Li]

Could try this:

suppose that you don't have a column name

tbl = readtable('yourExcelFile', 'ReadVariableNames', 0);

% N = the column index of that column you mentioned.

ind = find(contains(string(tbl.(N)), "bacon"));

tbl.(N)(ind+1) is what you need.

Note that this is suppose that you always have a number following the string, in case the last one if something that has a bacon field, you won't be able to find anything after that so the tbl.(N)(ind+1) will throw an error.