How do I move certain rows up or down in a cell array?

I have a cell array, which is sorted alphabetically. I need to move any row that contains a marker (for example, X), to the top of the list. How do I do that?

e.g.:

AAA AAB FFF FTD JJJ XXX XXY ZAF ZAE

So, I just need to move XXX and XXY to the beginning, and the rest of the array should remain the same.

Does anyone know of a script to do this automatically?

Thanks

Answer 1

[Matt J]

idx=~cellfun('isempty', strfind(yourcell,'X'));

yourcell=yourcell(:).';
yourcell=[yourcell(idx), yourcell(~idx)];

[Ziggy Zigg]

Great! That works beautifully!

What did you use the second statement for? Just to ensure the cell array is horizontal?

[Matt J]

Yes. If your cell array is really vertical and you want to keep it that way, just delete the 2nd line and concatenate vertically in the final line.

[Ziggy Zigg]

Thanks Matt. I had another problem while using this. I had used a cell sorting function, for which I had to convert the cell array to char. So in Workspace, the cell contents show up with three apostrophes. This causes the strfind to not work (error: If any of the input arguments are cell arrays, the first must be a cell array of strings and the second must be a character array). If I do a 'iscellstr' to my array, it returns 1, meaning it is a cell array of strings. Do you know what those three apostrophes mean? I'm not familiar with that. Also, if I delete another column in that cell array, the apostrohes disappear, and now I can use the code you pasted, no problem. I'm stumped.