Question

Could someone advice me how to merge a vector of ‘single’ and a vector of ‘int8’ in Matlab?

In details:

Tektronix AWG waveform format: each wave point = data and markers. data = single precision float, markers = byte. So each point is 5 bytes. I have these vectors in matlab. Each up to 32Mpoints. How to merge them fast?
The only that I have for now:

signal, markers

fsingle = fopen('temp.tmp','w');
fwrite(fsingle, signal, 'single');
fclose(fsingle);
f8 = fopen('temp.tmp','r');
b = fread(f8, [4 Inf],'int8');
fclose(f8);
f8 = fopen('output.wfm','w');
fwrite(f8, [b, markers]', 'int8');
fclose(f8);

This works. How can I execute lines 1 to 6 without writing on disk? It seems there are no pointers to variables in matlab…

Will be thankful for every idea,

Andrew

Answer 1

You probably want to use typecast:

Convert data types without changing underlying data

Basically this is almost like a pointer. You can look at your array of singles as bytes. Then you can Concatenate it with other byte arrays.