handling strings

[Mike Miller]

This is a seemingly simple problem but I find it hard to deal with in 
Octave (probably because there is some neat trick that I don't know). 
Here is the bare bones of it:

I have a file with strings delimited by any number of consecutive spaces 
and/or tabs.  The line may be padded with some spaces or tabs at either 
end that should be ignored.  I want to be able to read in the file as an 
array of strings.  Is that even possible?

Once I have the data in memory, I want to be able to find the array 
elements containing strings that match other strings in the array.  Let's 
call the array "A".  I would then want to do things like

find(A==A(2,3))

It seems that Octave and MATLAB normally like to store strings as vectors, 
which kinda messes up my scheme.

We're working on a C++ program to be used as a .oct file, but I'd like to 
understand how to do this within Octave anyway, if it is possible for 
Octave to do this kind of string handling.

Mike

--
Michael B. Miller, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health
and Institute of Human Genetics
University of Minnesota
http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/



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