Question

I’m testing an arbitrarily-large, arbitrarily-dimensioned array of logicals, and I’d like to find out if any one or more of them are true. any() only works on a single dimension at a time, as does sum(). I know that I could test the number of dimensions and repeat any() until I get a single answer, but I’d like a quicker, and frankly, more-elegant, approach.

Ideas?

I’m running 2009a (R17, in the old parlance, I think).

Answer 1

If your data is in a matrix A, try this:

anyAreTrue = any(A(:)); 

EDIT: To explain a bit more for anyone not familiar with the syntax, A(:) uses the colon operator to take the entire contents of the array A, no matter what the dimensions, and reshape them into a single column vector (of size numel(A)-by-1). Only one call to ANY is needed to operate on the resulting column vector.