Cell-Array operation in large Cell-Array (Vectorization?)

Hello,

I have a large cell-array containing 150k rows and 8 columns.

It's a mix of numbers and strings.

The end of the string in column 7 always is equal to the string in column 8 (e.g.: A{1,7} = 'hello test'; A{1,8} = 'test').

I want to "subtract" the strings in column 8 from column 7, as well as the space characters (varying length) in front of 'test' in the example above (of course for all elements).

It should look like this:

A{1,7} = 'hello'; A{1,8} = 'test'.

Is there an efficient way to do this without using a for-loop?

Thank you very much in advance.

Answer 1

[KSSV]

Read about erase.

https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/erase.html#:~:text=newStr%20%3D%20erase(%20str%20%2C%20match%20)%20deletes%20all%20occurrences%20of,to%20be%20the%20same%20size.

C1 = {'Hello man'; 'Hello boss' ; 'Hello kid'} ;
C2 = {'man'; 'boss' ; 'kid'} ;
C = erase(C1,C2)

C = 3×1 cell array
    {'Hello '}
    {'Hello '}
    {'Hello '}

[Valentin Pichlmaier]

with your method, there was an error because the array was too big...

strrep worked for me!

Thank you.

[KSSV]

What was the error?