MATLAB Data Types
MATLAB exposes numeric, character array, and string data types.
Description
All data types in MATLAB are arrays.
Elements of an array are accessed by subscripting; note that arrays index from 1.
first = A(1) last = A(end) middle = A(2:end-1)
Note that 2:end-1 expands to the row vector [2 3 ... end-1 end]. In other words, any row vector can be used as a subscript, and the elements of a subscripting row vector do not need to be sequential.
Assignment works as expected.
A(2) = 1 A(1) = A(2)
Matrices work in the same way by are indexed by row then column.
a = A(1,2)
If only one index is provided when subscripting a matrix, it is treated as a flattened vector by stacking all columns.
Rows and columns can be accessed from a matrix like:
row = A(1,:) column = A(:,1)
Numeric
All numeric variables are arrays. Colloquially, an array with a single element is called a scalar.
By default, all numeric values are stored as double-precision floating point. Other storage sizes are available however.
x = 3; y = [3 5];
A shorthand for an array of sequential numbers (with an optional step parameter) is:
a = 5:8; b = 20:2:24;
Storage Size
To declare a numeric array with a specific storage size, try:
y = uint64(10);
These declaration functions include:
double()
single()
int8()
int16()
int32()
int64()
uint8()
uint16()
uint32()
uint64()
Type Casting
The cast function is used to change the storage size of a numeric array. Try:
b = cast(a,"uint8");
The second argument must be one of:
"single"
"double"
"int8"
"int16"
"int32"
"int64"
"uint8"
"uint16"
"uint32"
"uint64"
"logical"
"char"
Character Array
Character arrays store a sequence of characters. They are declared like:
c = 'Hello World';
String
All string variables are arrays. Colloquially, a string array with a single element is called a string scalar.
str = "Greetings friend" str = ["Greetings friend" "Hello, world"]
To convert a numeric array into a string array, try:
>> str = string([1 24 356]); str = 1x3 string "1" "24" "356"