search for substring in cell array of strings

Hello,

I have this cell array of strings:

A = { 'This is how we do the shuffle', 'All night long there', 'In the club'};

I want to return the cell index where there is no 'the' in the cell array. I am using the following code:

str = 'the';
the _str = sprintf('\\<%s\\>',str);
index = strfind(A,the_str);
index_nothe = find(cellfun(@isempty,index));

however, I get an empty array for index. I put the '\\<%s\\>' to search for only the word 'the'.

I would like to return [2] for index, as that is the only cell that does not contain 'the'.

Can you tell me where I am going wrong?

Thanks.

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

A = { 'This is how we do the shuffle', 'All night long there', 'In the club'}
idx=find(cellfun(@isempty,regexp(A,'the(\s)+','match')))

[monkey_matlab]

Hello, Thanks for your response Azzi!

I actually put the sprintf('\\<%s\\>',str) command because str is a variable and will change depending on varying inputs. That is, str will not always be 'the', it may be someting else.

But can you tell me why my attempt is not giving me the desired result?

Thanks.