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

EDIT:

I have edited my earlier solution so that you won't have to supply a maxLength parameter to the function. The function calculates it before doing the padding.

function out=joinUnevenVectors(varargin)
%#Horizontally catenate multiple column vectors by appending zeros 
%#at the ends of the shorter vectors
%#
%#SYNTAX: out = joinUnevenVectors(vec1, vec2, ... , vecN)

    maxLength=max(cellfun(@numel,varargin));
    out=cell2mat(cellfun(@(x)cat(1,x,zeros(maxLength-length(x),1)),varargin,'UniformOutput',false));

The convenience of having it as a function is that you can easily join multiple uneven vectors in a single line as joinUnevenVectors(vec1,vec2,vec3,vec4) and so on, without having to manually enter it in each line.

EXAMPLE:

short = [1 2 3]';
long = [4 5 6 7]';
joinUnevenVectors(short,long)

ans =

     1     4
     2     5
     3     6
     0     7