Question

I currently have the following function, but is there a more efficient way to generate a random integer within a range and exclude a specific integer in Matlab?

function aNew = random(a)
aMin = a-100;
aMax = a+100;
aNew = a;
while aNew == a
    aNew = randi([aMin, aMax]);
end

Answer 1

You can use the function randsample to draw samples from a specified distribution.

Something like this should work fine

sampleRange = [1, 100];  % sample from 1 to 100
noSample = 50; % lets exclude 50
pop2Sample = [range(1):noSample-1, noSample+1:range(2)]; %create the population

sample = randsample(pop2Sample,1); %draw a single sample

Update

If you wanted to exclude multiple values from your population you could use the setdiff function.

pop2Sample = 1:100;  % sample from 1 to 100
noSample = 0:10:100 % lets exclude any all multiples of ten
pop2Sample = setdiff(pop2Sample, noSample);

sample = randsample(pop2Sample,1); %draw a single sample