how to label strings in an array with an ID

I have a array

StringID=['a',1;
          'b',2;
          'c',3]

and a table with a column with a bunch of strings that exactly match the strings in StringID.

tc=['c';
    'b';
    'c';
    'a';
    'c']

How can I make a column vector that identifies the strings with the number in StringID?

ans=[3;
     2;
     3;
     1;
     3]

I would like this to be scaleable to a few thousand rows and a StringID column of a couple hundred strings. I feel like there is a simple solution I'm not thinking of. I assume there is some combo of find and strcmp that I'm not thinking of. I could probably just do it with a loop, but I am trying to avoid that.

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

See ismember()

StringID needs to be a cell array. Then,

[~, idx] = ismember(tc,StringID(:,1));

Also see lower() if you want to control for cases.

[madhan ravi]

Ah much better ;)

[Ryan Rose]

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

Answer 2

[madhan ravi]

 T = cell2table(StringID(:, 2));
 T.Properties.RowNames = StringID(:, 1);
 Wanted = T{num2cell(tc), :}