Indexing a variable in a cell array?

I am a college-level mechanical engineer writing (what I thought was) basic software for a small cabinet installation company. My program starts by reading two Excel spreadsheets that have job information stored in strings and numbers, and then converts them into string arrays:

[nums1, txt1]=xlsread('Job_Information');
[nums2, txt2]=xlsread('Subjob_Information');
txt1=string(txt1);
txt2=string(txt2);

The program then asks the user to input a date, and I want the program to find and index the subjobs that have the corresponding dates:

fprintf('To begin, enter a date in the mm/dd/yyyy format:');
date=input(' ','s');

So it saves the input date as a string, and I want to compare that string to what is stored in the cell array, kind of like so:

find(txt2==date);

I know that isn't the correct syntax, but I hope that better illustrates my problem. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

strcmpi(txt2,date)

But...

• you should be using READTABLE to import that file data,
• and handle those dates as DATETIME, not as text.

[Peyton FitzGerald]

Thank you very much! That all worked!