MATLAB: use strcmp(s1,s2) for variable length vector with strings - arrays

Question

I have a query which I am trying to solve
I know that one can use strcmp(s1,s2) to compare two different strings to see whether they are the same. It gives 1 if that is the case.
However, how would one tackle this problem if you have a variable length array full of strings and you want to the whether all strings in the array are the same.
For example: ['NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010'] we can see that all the strings are the same in this array. However, how would one go about with using strcmp(s1,s2).
Thanks guys!

Answer 1

If you want all pairwise comparisons between strings: call ndgrid to generate indices of all combinations, and then index into your cell array of strings and call strcmp:
x = {'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010'};
[ii, jj] = ndgrid(1:numel(x));
result = strcmp(x(ii), x(jj));
In this case
result =
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
because all strings are the same.

Answer 2

You probably had a pairwise comparison using strcmp in mind, but you can use it directly on cell arrays:
x={'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010'}
result=all(strcmpi(x{1},x(2:end)))
Compare the first element to the remaining elements. It returns true only if all elements are equal. For a pairwise comparison you could us:
[~,~,c]=unique(x);
result=bsxfun(#eq,c,c.')

Answer 3

If you're solving the problem with a matrix (i.e. every row is a string) there are no particularly nice solutions in my opinion, but if your strings are contained into a cell array, things are getting easier and nicer.
So we start by creating such cell array:
myStrings={'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010' 'NACA64A010'};
where each cell contains a string. This will make your code more robust as well since every string can have a different length (this is not true if you concatenate all your strings in a matrix).
Then you specify which string you want to find inside such cell array:
stringThatMustBeTested='NACA64A010';
Now you can use cellfun(), which is a function that applies another function to every cell of a given cell array as follows:
results=cellfun(#(x) strcmp(x,stringThatMustBeTested),myStrings);
Such line simply means "apply strcmp() to every generic cell x inside myStrings and compare the cell with stringThatMustBeTested".
Variable results will be a logical output in which element j will be true if the j-th cell in your cell array is equal to the string you want to test. If results is entirely composed by 1s (which you can check as if sum(results)==length(results)), then all the strings are the same in myStrings (given that stringThatMustBeTested is the unique string in your cell array but anyways, this solution can be extended to a broader string search inside a cell).