MATLAB Concatenate matrices with unequal dimensions

Question

Is there any easy way to concatenate matrices with unequal dimensions using zero padding?

short = [1 2 3]\';
long = [4 5 6 7]\';
desiredResult = horzcat(shor         


        

Answer 1

Matrices in MATLAB are automatically grown and padded with zeroes when you assign to indices outside the current bounds of the matrix. For example:

>> short = [1 2 3]';
>> long = [4 5 6 7]';
>> desiredResult(1:numel(short),1) = short;  %# Add short to column 1
>> desiredResult(1:numel(long),2) = long;    %# Add long to column 2
>> desiredResult

desiredResult =

     1     4
     2     5
     3     6
     0     7