Remove duplicate on rows

I'm working with nominative patent data from french applicants. So my file contains the name of the patent applicants. Each row is a patent, and each contains the name of one of the patent applicants. But there are duplicate. I would like to clean each row of the duplicate names (since each row is a patent and the names are in column).

Does anybody have an idea ?

Answer 1

[Ergin Sezgin]

Hello Heman,

Try using unique function which returns only the unique elements in the array.

newData = unique(yourData);

If you want the process to be non-case sensitive, for example if there are two elements 'Adam Smith' and 'adam smith', you can use lower function, and then unique function.

[~, idx] = (unique(lower(yourData)));   
newData = yourData(idx)

I hope it helps.