What is your favourite MATLAB/Octave programming trick? [closed]

Answer 1

Using ismember() to merge data organized by text identfiers. Useful when you are analyzing differing periods when entries, in my case company symbols, come and go.

%Merge B into A based on Text identifiers
UniverseA = {'A','B','C','D'};
UniverseB = {'A','C','D'};

DataA = [20 40 60 80];
DataB = [30 50 70];

MergeData = NaN(length(UniverseA),2);

MergeData(:,1) = DataA;

[tf, loc] = ismember(UniverseA, UniverseB);

MergeData(tf,2) = DataB(loc(tf));

 MergeData =

20    30
40   NaN
60    50
80    70