Filling a matrix row by row and saving it to a .mat file

I have a function with input arguments which everytime it is called, it will fill a matrix according to those input arguments. For example: func(a,b,c,d,e)

Everytime the function is called, it will keep on filling a matrix until 'a' is reached:

for example if the user inputs func(3,1,2,3,4), the output will be:

1 1 2 3 4 2 1 2 3 4 3 1 2 3 4

This will be saved to a matrix first, then saved into a .mat file. However, every time i call the function with different inputs, the previous values are overwritten with the new input values from the function call. I have used the -append but that stil overwrites the previous values. Is there a way so that everytime i do a function call, the the new inputs will append to the previous values in the matrix instead of overwriting them? For example:

func(3,1,2,3,4)

1 1 2 3 4 2 1 2 3 4 3 1 2 3 4

func(4,1,2,3,3)

1 1 2 3 4 2 1 2 3 4 3 1 2 3 4 4 1 2 3 3 5 1 2 3 3 6 1 2 3 3 7 1 2 3 3

As you can see i also want to make the index continue counting from the previous index everytime i call the function. Thank you.

Answer 1

[Stephen]

I think what you're after is horizontal concatenation.

One way:

a = 1; %a has to be defined first

%then inside of some loop, maybe?
a = [a function(a,b,c,d,e)];

%right before you're done with it
a = a(2:end); %gets rid of the junk assigned when a = 1 on the first line

[Victor]

Is there an alternative way? Essentially I want to call the function a number of times and fill the matrix horizontally. Then at the end, I want to save the entire matrix as a variable into a .mat file. There wont be just one variable inside the .mat file, but i would like to have many different matrices in the .mat file as well.

[Stephen]

The variable at the end of the last statement "a = a(2:end)" should be what you want for that variable. Saving more than one variable to the mat file is independent of how they are actually constructed and can be accomplished as:

save('filename.mat','a','variable2','variable3'); %and so on