Faster version of find for sorted vectors (MATLAB)

Question

I have code of the following kind in MATLAB:

indices = find([1 2 2 3 3 3 4 5 6 7 7] == 3)

This returns 4,5,6 - the indices of elements in t

Answer 1

This is not an answer - I am just comparing the running time of the three solutions suggested by chappjc and Daniel R.

N = 5e7;    % length of vector
p = 0.99;    % probability
KK = 100;    % number of instances
rntm1 = zeros(KK, 1);    % runtime with ismember
rntm2 = zeros(KK, 1);    % runtime with ismembc
rntm3 = zeros(KK, 1);    % runtime with Daniel's function
for kk = 1:KK
    x = cumsum(rand(N, 1) > p);
    searchfor = x(ceil(4*N/5));

    tic
    [tf,loc]=ismember(x, searchfor);
    inds1 = find(tf);
    rntm1(kk) = toc;

    tic
    tf = ismembc(x, searchfor);
    inds2 = find(tf);
    rntm2(kk) = toc;

    tic
    a=1;
    b=numel(x);
    c=1;
    d=numel(x);
    while (a+1

Daniel's binary search is very fast.

% Mean of running time
mean([rntm1 rntm2 rntm3])
% 0.631132275892504   0.295233981447746   0.000400786666188

% Percentiles of running time
prctile([rntm1 rntm2 rntm3], [0 25 50 75 100])
% 0.410663611685559   0.175298784336465   0.000012828868032
% 0.429120717937665   0.185935198821797   0.000014539383770
% 0.582281366154709   0.268931132925888   0.000019243302048
% 0.775917520641649   0.385297304740352   0.000026940622867
% 1.063753914942895   0.592429428396956   0.037773746662356