Question

When I make a 1×10 matrix in MATLAB, such as a=[1:10], it returns:

a =
     1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9    10

i. e., it ignores zero-digit from numbers 1 to 9. I’d like to have a matrix like that:

a =
     01     02     03     04     05     06     07     08     09    10.

Answer 1

If you want to display numbers in a specific format, you can overload the disp function for the specific type of number. In that function, you’ll need to create a string with leading zeros.

If you want to create strings that contain numbers with leading zeros, you can use sprintf. For example, if you want to have

year = 2012;
month = 6;
day = 1;

you can create a file name with leading zeros like this:

fileName = sprintf('%i%02i%02i.dat',year,month,day)
fileName =
    20120601.dat