Cell Array manipulation for text data

Hi, As part of a college project I must clean a dataset that consists of 10 x 120000 cell array. Each of the rows contain information about an individual who took part in a race, their name, location,time etc. I have successfully retrieved this data from excel and removed all the ‘unknown’ named participants:

[~,~,raw]=xlsread('File Wk1edited_Original.xlsx ');

[Z, ~] = find(cellfun(@(s) isequal(s, 'Unknown'), raw));

I need to assign a user ID to each individual participant which takes into account their location (e.g. the first town would have a code of 10000) and their name (e.g. a code of 1), in alphabetical order. For example, if Aaron Adams competed in Ahane then he would have a user ID of 10001, combining location and name. I also know that some of the participants took part several times so if Aaron Adams where to come up again I would want him to be given the user ID 10001 each time.

I’m really struggling with this and would appreciate the help. If it’s not clear enough please message and I will clarify.

Thanks in advance.

[dpb]

Are you aware of the table data class?

doc unique

will serve to go quite a long ways towards solving your above specific problem. It will undoubtedly take a lot of manual correction to fixup all the typos this will uncover and/or the research into whether the two Bill Jones's are really one and the same one or not.