Finding a character and returning that character

I have a function:

function [ vowels ] = findVowels( charCell )
%FINDVOWELS
%   charCell: a two-dimensional cell array and each cell contains a
%   character array
%   vowels: a cell array with the same dimensions as charCell that contains
%   only the vowels of each entry, in lower case

vowels=charCell;
switch vowels
  case strfind(charCell, 'a')
      disp('a')
  case strfind(charCell, 'e')
      disp('e')
  case strfind(charCell, 'i')
      disp('i')
  case strfind(charCell, 'o')
      disp('o')
  case strfind(charCell, 'u')
      disp('u')
end

end

And I want the function to search for the vowels and RETURN those vowels for example:

>>X={'hi','hello';'goodbye', 'later'};
>>findVowels(X)
ans=
2x2 cell array
'i'          'eo'
'ooe'        'ae'

My current function results in an error because vowels is not a scalar or a character. How do I go about this to produce a character?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

There was extensive discussion of this at https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/360652-display-the-characters-as-output

Answer 2

[ES]

Your variable vowels is a cell array. You cant switch based on a cell array. Instead take each word, and run a for loop on each character. some thing like this,

for iLoop=1:length(charCell)
    sCurrentWord = charCell{iLoop};
    if ~isempty(strfind(charCell, 'a'))
        disp('a')
    end
    if ~isempty(strfind(charCell, 'e'))
       disp('e')
    end
..and so on..
end

I would suggest to use regexp instead.