Determining the number of occurrences of each word in cell array

Question

I have huge vector of words, and I want a vector with the unique words only, and the frequency for each word. I've already tried hist and histc but they are for numeric value. I know the function tabulate but it gives the words some ' (e.g this turns to 'this'). If you have any idea how to do it MATLAB it would be great. thanks

Answer 1

You were on the right track! Just use unique first to prepare the numeric input for hist. The trick is that the word occurence ids returned by unique can be used as input for the hist function, so you can get the counts without explicit for loops:

words = {'abba' 'bed' 'carrot' 'damage' 'bed'};
[unique_words, ~, occurrences] = unique(words);
unique_counts = hist(occurrences, 1:max(occurrences));

This yields:

>> unique_words 
    'abba'    'bed'    'carrot'    'damage'

>> unique_counts
     1     2     1     1