Looking for a word in a 2D array

Hey guys, so I am having trouble finishing my code for this problem: Write a function called WordSearch.m that looks for a word in a 2-D character array. The function should take in two inputs:

1. an m by n character array (letters in the Englishalphabet) that is the word search grid and
2. a cell array of words that should be searchedfor.

The function looks for each word from the cell array in the 2-D character array. It searches for the word horizontally (left-to-right) and vertically (top-to-bottom). The function then returns a cell array that stores the row and column indices of the first character of the word if the word was found and an empty array ([]) if the word was not found. Your function should ignore the case of the letters. Your function does not need to find words ordered diagonally or backwards (right-to-left or bottom-to-top). Example:

testArray=['c' 'E' 'L' 'l'; 'S' 'U' 'r' 'I'; 'e' 'f' 'd' 'S'; 'T' 'A' 'G' 't'];
function cellArray= WordSearch(array,words)
[s1,s2]= size(words)
[m,n]= size(array)
cellArray=[]
B=1
r=1
c=1
%
for ii=1:s2 %word
    found = 1 %true
    for r:m %row
        %
        if (strcmpi(array(r,:), words(ii))==1) %L to R
            cellArray(B)=[r,c]
            B=B+1
            found = 0 %turns false
        %    
        elseif found
            for c:n %column
                if (strcmpi(array(:,c), words(ii))==1)% T to B
                    cellArray(B)=[r,c]
                    B=B+1
                 else
                    cellArray(B)=[]
                    B=B+1
                end
            end
        end
    end
end

Im pretty stuck and do not know where to go from here.

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

[Joseph Cheng]

I would take a look at the function strfind(), and lower() or upper().

strfind() will return the starting index value of the found string.

so if i had

testArray = ['c' 'E' 'L' 'l'; 'S' 'U' 'r' 'I'; 'e' 'f' 'd' 'S'; 'T' 'A' 'G' 't']
words = {'Cell','set','sell'}
      [row]=strfind(testArray(1,:),lower(words{1}));
      [col]=strfind(testArray(:,1)',lower(words{1}));
%replacing the 1 there with the an incremental index of the for loop

you can see that col returns with 1 and col is empty because the string was not found vertically (note the transpose and retreival of the of the column array)

with that you can then see which one you have, row or column and which column/row you fed it from the for loop.

[Alex Flores]

where do you suggest I insert this?