Question

I am trying to use MATLAB in order to simulate a communications encoding and decoding mechanism. Hence all of the data will be 0’s or 1’s.

Initially I created a vector of a specific length and populated with 0’s and 1’s using

source_data = rand(1,8192)<.7;

For encoding I need to perform XOR operations multiple times which I was able to do without any issue.

For the decoding operation I need to implement the Gaussian Elimination method to solve the set of equations where I realized this vector representation is not very helpful. I tried to use strcat to append multiple 0’s and 1’s to a variable a using a for loop:

for i=1:8192
    if(mod(i,2)==0)
        a = strcat(a,'0');
    else
        a = strcat(a,'1');
    end
    i = i+1;
    disp(i);
end

when I tried length(a) after this I found that the length was 16384, which is twice 8192. I am not sure where I am going wrong or how best to tackle this.

Answer 1

There are probably a few answer/questions here. Firstly, how can one go from an arbitrary vector containing {0,1} elements to a string? One way would be to use cellfun with the converter num2str:

dataDbl = rand(1,8192)<.7;                       %see the original question
dataStr = cellfun(@num2str, num2cell(dataDbl));  

Note that cellfun concatenates uniform outputs.