CODEWITHSUNDEEP
matlab
Marco Paiva
Marco Paiva

Reputation: 27

Sorting an array of cells by the first element of each cell

My problem is in how to sort an array of cells considering only the first element of each cell in that vector:

array_A={[3 1 5] [1 6 2] [2 4 1]}

I want to sort array_A, by the first element of each cell like this:

array_A={[*1* 6 2] [*2* 4 1] [*3* 1 5]}

Do you have any idea on how can I solve this, in a way that it can be done recursively for thousands of cells?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1349

Answers (1)

Jonas
Jonas

Reputation: 74940

The easiest might just be to catenate array_A to create a numeric array and sort based on that. If the vectors are long, or of different lengths, you may want to extract the first element of each element of the cell array first and sort that.

In other words:

%# extract the first number from each element of array_A
firstElement = cellfun(@(x)x(1),array_A);
%# sort (the ~ discards the first output argument of sort)
[~,sortIdx] = sort(firstElement);
%# sort array_A using the proper sort order
array_A_sorted = array_A(sortIdx);

Upvotes: 4

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