Delete string and double redundancy in cell of matlab

Question

I have a cell array with two columns. One consists of strings and the other of doubles. I would like to delete all rows, which are redundant.

b = cell(4,2);
b{1,1} = 'a';
b{1,2} = 2;
b{2,1} = 'a';
b{2,2} = 1;
b{3,1} = 'b';
b{3,2} = 1;
b{4,1} = 'a';
b{4,2} = 2;

So that in the list above the row a 2 will be deleted. Also a sorting would be nice. I found the 'unique' function which tells me that it just works for all string cells. Is there another function for mixed cells?

Best regards Manuel

Answer 1

This is the answer thanks to the help I got. Convert the doubles to strings, merge the two strings, unique, separate again and convert the string to double:

b = cell(4,2);
b{1,1} = 'a';
b{1,2} = 2;
b{2,1} = 'a';
b{2,2} = 1;
b{3,1} = 'b';
b{3,2} = 1;
b{4,1} = 'a';
b{4,2} = 2;
b

btemp = {};
for i = 1:size(b)   
    [~,columns]=size(btemp);
    btemp{columns+1} = strcat(b{i,1},sprintf('%.3f',b{i,2}));
end
btemp = unique(btemp);
[~,columns]=size(btemp);

b2 = cell(columns,2);
for j = 1:columns
    b2{j,1} = btemp{j}(1);
    b2{j,2} = str2double(btemp{j}(2:end));
end

b2