Matching certain characters of strings

Say I have a big cell array of strings (they are item numbers), and I want to say:

If string matches '140xx1', then Type = 1,

If string matches '140xx2' then Type = 2,

If string matches '140xx3' then Type = 3,

If string matches '145xxx' then Type = 4,

(where x can be any character).

How can I do this in MATLAB?

Many thanks,

Chris

Answer 1

[Thorsten]

 item_number_list = { '140xx3' '140xx3' '140xx1' '145xxx' '140xx2' '140xx3'};
 item_numbers = {'140xx1' '140xx2' '140xx3' '145xxx'};

 for i=1:length(item_number_list)
   item_type(i) = find(strcmp(item_numbers, item_number_list{i}));
 end

[Christiaan]

Thanks, but I don't think this solves the problem. 'x' could appear as any character in the item number list (it could be a '1', an 'A', etc). For example, it could be:

item_number_list = { '140003' '140013' '140001' '145012' '140022' '140123'};

Any more suggestions? I think I may have to use regexp, but I'm not really sure how to make it do this.

Answer 2

[Thorsten]

Oh, I haven't realized that x were meant as placeholders for any number. In this case, use

item_numbers = {'140xx1' '140xx2' '140xx3' '145xxx'};
item_number_list = { '140003' '140013' '140001' '145012' '140022' '140123'};

for i=1:length(item_number_list)
 item = item_number_list{i};
 item(4:5) = 'xx';
 if item(3) == '5', item(6) = 'x'; end
  item_type(i) = find(strcmp(item_numbers, item));
end

Answer 3

[Jos (10584)]

I seems that only the last character of the string is of importance:

LIST = {'140111','140aa4','999cc3','123ZZ1','145xxx'}
TYPE = cellfun(@(x) x(numel(x))-'0', LIST) 
TYPE(~ismember(TYPE,[1 2 3])) = 4

Answer 4

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

 yourlist={'140221','140214','140111','140223','140544','140773'}
type1=yourlist(cell2mat(cellfun(@(x) ~isempty(regexp(x,'\<140\d\d1\>')),yourlist,'un',0)))
type2=yourlist(cell2mat(cellfun(@(x) ~isempty(regexp(x,'\<140\d\d2\>')),yourlist,'un',0)))
type3=yourlist(cell2mat(cellfun(@(x) ~isempty(regexp(x,'\<140\d\d3\>')),yourlist,'un',0)))
type4=yourlist(cell2mat(cellfun(@(x) ~isempty(regexp(x,'\<140\d\d4\>')),yourlist,'un',0)))