match the first letter in a cell and save

Hi, without using a loop for the cell I would like to the the following: I have a 5x1 cell and I would like to check to see if the first letter starts with an 'P'. if it does then I would like to save the cell to another variable eg:

 variable<5x1 cell>=
 A string 1 - cell 1
 P string 2 - cell 2
 P string 3 - cell 3
 A string 4 - cell 4
 P string 5 - cell 5

 new_variable<3x1 cell>=
 P string 2 - cell 2
 P string 3 - cell 3
 P string 5 - cell 5

Answer 1

[Kye Taylor]

Try this (I assume your cell is called variable)

idx = cellfun(@(s)strncmp(s,'P',1),variable)
newCell = variable(idx);

note that strncmp function is case sensitive so be sure you have 'P' and not 'p'. If you want to detect both lower and upper case p, use this command

idx = cellfun(@(s)strncmp(s,'P',1)|strncmp(s,'p',1),variable)