Print specific parts of a cell as strings in matlab? - arrays

Question

I have the following matrix array B :
B=[1 2 3; 10 20 30 ; 100 200 300 ; 500 600 800];
Which through a code is combined to form possible combinations between the values. The results are stored in cell G. Such that G :
G=
[1;20;100;500]
[0;30;0;800]
[3;0;0;600]
.
.
etc
I want to format the results based on which value from B is chosen :
[1 2 3] = 'a=1 a=2 a=3'
[10 20 30] = 'b=1 b=2 b=3'
[100 200 300]= 'c=1 c=2 c=3'
[500 600 800]= 'd=1 d=2 d=3'
Example, using the results in the current cell provided :
[1;20;100;500]
[0;30;0;800]
[3;0;0;600]
Should print as
a=1 & b=2 & c=1 & d=1
a=0 & b=3 & c=0 & d=3 % notice that 0 should be printed although not present in B
a=3 & b=0 & c=0 & d=2
Note that the cell G will vary depending on the code and is not fixed. The code used to generate the results can be viewed here : Need help debugging this code in Matlab
Please let me know if you require more info about this.

Answer 1

You can try this:
k = 1; % which row of G
string = sprintf('a = %d, b = %d, c = %d, d = %d',...
max([0 find(B(1,:) == G{k}(1))]), ...
max([0 find(B(2,:) == G{k}(2))]), ...
max([0 find(B(3,:) == G{k}(3))]), ...
max([0 find(B(4,:) == G{k}(4))]) ...
);
For instance, for k = 1 of your example data this results in
string =
a = 1, b = 2, c = 1, d = 1
A short explanation of this code (as requested in the comments) is as follows. For the sake of simplicity, the example is limited to the first value of G and the first line of B.
% searches whether the first element in G can be found in the first row of B
% if yes, the index is returned
idx = find(B(1,:) == G{k}(1));
% if the element was not found, the function find returns an empty element. To print
% a 0 in these cases, we perform max() as a "bogus" operation on the results of
% find() and 0. If idx is empty, it returns 0, if idx is not empty, it returns
% the results of find().
val = max([0 idx])
% this value val is now formatted to a string using sprintf
string = sprintf('a = %d', val);