Unique values in cell array

Hi, I have a cell array and would like to find the unique values (by row) in the cell array. Each row has a variable number of numbers. However, in the documentation, unique function does not support cell array by row. Is there a way i can get past this? Thanks!

C = unique(A,___,'rows')

[Geoff Hayes]

Charms - do you mean that you want to find the unique integers from the two columns in a single row?

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

The cells in ‘locations’ have from 3 to 10 columns, so comparing all of them by rows is not possible.

Likely the best you can do is to get the unique rows of the elements in ‘locations’ that share the same number of columns.

This code does that:

D = load('locations.mat');
locations = D.locations;

for k = 1:size(locations,1)
    rowc{k,:} = [locations{k,:}];
    rowlen(k,:) = numel(rowc{k});
end

[lenv,~,ix] = unique(rowlen);
eqcol = accumarray(ix, (1:numel(rowlen))', [], @(x){x});

for k = 1:numel(lenv)
    rowm = cell2mat(rowc(eqcol{k}));
    U{k,:} = unique(rowm, 'rows');
end

To see the result, for example for the 4-column cells:

Rows4 = cell2mat(rowc(eqcol{2}))
Check4 = U{2}

with ‘Rows4’ being the original cell array of those combined cells, and ‘Check4’ being the unique rows.

.

[Dave]

Maybe I misunderstand but doesn't the following meet your requirements

B = cellfun(B = cellfun(@unique, locations(:), 'UniformOutput', false))

[Star Strider]

@Dave — First, that is definitely incorrect MATLAB code. It is not possible to run it.

Second, Charms wants to see if the rows are unique, that being the whole point.

So I seriously doubt that it would.

Answer 2

[Patrik Forssén]

My new FEX-submission uniquearray,

https://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/100134-uniquearray

solves this (and works for any type of array with any number of dimensions). Just use,

load('locations.mat', 'locations');
uniqueloc = uniquearray(locations)

[Madmad]

Thanks for this script it helped me, I just had to divide my 1x200,000 cell into smaller steps to speed up the process, I think your script check the entire variable, which made it slow for my var, but in the end it worked!