If you have a cell array of strings in Octave like this:
arr = {"a", "bc", "def"}
you can check if it contains a specific string like "a"
using
contains_a = any(strcmp(arr, 'a'))
Example:
arr = {"a", "bc", "def"} contains_a = any(strcmp(arr, 'a')) contains_x = any(strcmp(arr, 'x')) disp(contains_a) # 1 disp(contains_x) # 0