You don't need cellfun, if you read the documentation, contains works natively on cell arrays of characters:

a = {'hello', 'world', 'friends'};
b = contains(a, 'o');

Which returns:

b =

  1×3 logical array

   1   1   0

Do you want to search for 'bla' within the text in each element of the cell array, or for elements that are 'bla' exactly? If you explain this detail, then your question would be easier to answer. If you are searching for text that has 'bla' as part of the text, then starting in R2016b you can use the “contains” function, as Alexander Cranney pointed out. Index = find(contains(C,'bla')); The function "contains" returns a logical array. This type of logical indexing can be used to make many workflows more efficient. For more on using logical arrays, refer to the documentation: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/math/array-indexing.html#MatrixIndexingExample-3 https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/find-array-elements-that-meet-a-condition.html In previous versions of MATLAB (before R2016b), you can use the “strfind” function. However, “strfind” returns a cell array of indices. For any input cell whose text does not contain 'bla', “strfind” returns an empty cell. Use “isempty” and “cellfun” with the “find” function to find the empty cells. IndexC = strfind(C,'bla'); Index = find(not(cellfun('isempty',IndexC))) If you are searching for text that is exactly 'bla', then see Jos’ answer.

Your |cellfun| code simply says: negate the content of each cell in the outer cell array. However, that content is itself a cell array and matlab doesn't know how to negate a cell array. So you need another |cellfun| to go into these inner cell array: cellfun(@(x) cellfun(@uminus, x, 'UniformOutput', false), respCol, 'UniformOutput', false) Note that cellfun(@uminus, cellarray) %uminus is the function name of the negate operator - will be faster than cellfun(@(x) -x, cellarray)

There's no built-in function for this. If all you want to know is whether each string in the cell array is present in your big string: ispresent = cellfun(@(s) ~isempty(strfind(string, s)), elements)

C = {1,5,3,4,2,3,4,5,2,1}; index = find([C{:}] == 5); Here [C{:}] is a faster inlined version of |cell2mat|. Alternative: index = cellfun(@(x) x==5, C, 'UniformOutput', 1); Or the long and most likely faster form: index = false(1, numel(C)) for k = 1:numel(C) index(k) = (C{k} == 5); end *[EDITED]* If you are talking of a cell string, this is much faster: D = {'1' '5' '3' '4' '2' '3' '4' '5' '2' '1'}; index = find(strcmp(D, '5'));

I guess the following code could do the trick:

strs = {'HA' 'KU' 'LA' 'MA' 'TATA'}
ind=find(ismember(strs,'KU'))

This returns

ans = 
     2

I have created a small data sample as part of an example which I hope will help you solve the problem.

%Create cell array of strings.
data = {["2018","date","2018";"stack","cell2018","fun"],["data","stackoverflow","2018";"array","variable","data2018"]}

%Search for substring 2018 in the first column of every cell.
time = cellfun(@(x) contains(x(:,1),'2018'),data,'UniformOutput',0)

The output of time is a logical cell array:

>>time 

{2×1 logical}    {2×1 logical}

>>time{1}

1
0

>>time{2}

0
0

For the first cell, the column contains 2018 and stack, therefore 1 and 0 are returned.

For the second cell, the column contains data and array, therefore 0 and 0 are returned.

If you wish to find the indexes from the logical array, you can use the find function with outputs [row,col].