Question

I am trying to use MATLAB in order to generate a variable whose elements are either 0 or 1. I want to define this variable using some kind of concatenation (equivalent of Java string append) so that I can add as many 0’s and 1’s according to some upper limit.

I can only think of using a for loop to append values to an existing variable. Something like

variable=1;
for i=1:N
    if ( i%2==0)
        variable = variable.append('0')
    else 
        variable = variable.append('1')
    i=i+1;
end

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

In MATLAB, you can almost always avoid a loop by treating arrays in a vectorized way.

The result of pseudo-code you provided can be obtained in a single line as:

variable = mod((1:N),2);

The above line generates a row vector [1,2,...,N] (with the code (1:N), use (1:N)' if you need a column vector) and the mod function (as most MATLAB functions) is applied to each element when it receives an array.