I am trying to initialize an empty array which itself contains 5 empty arrays. But matlab seems to just create a simple empty array variable instead. Following are the two syntaxes I have tried. Any ideas if it is possible in matlab?
bins = [ []; []; []; []; [] ];
bins = repmat([], 5, 1)
deal is a good function for such an assignment:
[bins{1:5}] = deal([]);
This creates a cell array bins, where each element bins{i} contains an empty array.
[] inside the deal would itself need to be m empty spaces. Initializing it with empty members instead of using zeros is better if there is a chance what is going into the array would itself have a value of 0 (otherwise you can't distinguish between a zero in the data or an error stopping you from assigning to that position).MATLAB only has matrices, i.e. (potentially multidimensional) arrays of numerical types (or characters or logical values). To group other structures in one variable, try a cell array, e.g.
bins = { []; []; []; []; [] };
You then have to access elements of the outer array with curly brackets, e.g. bins{2} instead of bins(2).
Another trick to initialize this:
>> bins = {} %# just to make sure `bins` wasn't used before
>> bins{5} = []
bins =
[] [] [] [] []
