Pre-locating an array

Hi MATLAB guys,

I got stuck at some point and really appreciate your help.

Do you know how can I pre-locate the value of X in the following code? X is a matrix and for each i and j its dimentions will change. For example for given i and j, X has a dimention of Ri * Tj.

N = [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10];
M = [11 22 33];
X === zeros  %%%%pre-locating here
for k = 1 : 10
    for m = 1 : N(k)
       for i = 1 : 3;
         for j = 1: M(i)
              X(:,:, j,i,m,k) = sth;
        end
      end
   end
end

Thanks in advance

[Rik]

Do you know the size of sth in advance?

[Susan]

Thanks for your reply. It depends on the i and j and for different i and j the size of this matrix is different. And, yes, I know the sizes in advance.

Answer 1

[James Tursa]

Numeric arrays must be rectangular. You cannot have different dimensions for different slices. To get that behavior you would need to use something like a cell array to store your different sized variables. E.g.,

X{j,i,m,k} = sth;

But, even though the contents of the cell array elements do not all have to be the same size, the cell array itself must be rectangular. You could still use it in your above scheme as long as it was OK to have a bunch of empty cells in the spots you were not using.

[Susan]

Thanks for your reply. I would like to use cell. As you said, since the dimensions of matrix X is changing, the best way to store it is cell array. I just don't know how to do that. Any idea? Thanks

[Rik]

You can use the code James suggested, and you can do it like this:

N = [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10];
M = [11 22 33];
X=cell(max(M(:)),numel(M),max(N(:)),numel(N));
for k = 1 : numel(N)
    for m = 1 : N(k)
       for i = 1 : numel(M)
         for j = 1: M(i)
             X{j,i,m,k} = sth;
         end
       end
    end
end

[Susan]

Thank you so much! I appreciate your help.