How to assign values to a MATLAB matrix on the diagonal?

Question

Suppose I have an NxN matrix A, an index vector V consisting of a subset of the numbers 1:N, and a value K, and I want to do this:

 for i = V
     A(i,i) = K         


        

Answer 1

A = zeros(7,6);
V = [1 3 5];

[n m] = size(A);
diagIdx = 1:n+1:n*m;
A( diagIdx(V) ) = 1

A =
     1     0     0     0     0     0
     0     0     0     0     0     0
     0     0     1     0     0     0
     0     0     0     0     0     0
     0     0     0     0     1     0
     0     0     0     0     0     0
     0     0     0     0     0     0