vector to string

Converts a vector to a string, using the colon operator to represent linearly spaced subvectors.

Description

This is a small M-file that can be thought of as the inverse of the colon operator: it takes a linearly spaced row vector and generates a compact notation for that vector.
It handles concatenations of such vectors too, and will in fact for any real array (subject to considerations of numerical precision) generate a valid string representation of that array as a reshaped row vector.
I wrote this because I found myself using input dialog boxes in a GUI, where a numeric vector is entered as a string to be parsed by str2num, and I wanted to provide the current value of the vector as the default answer. mat2str already does this, but the result is unwieldy for all but the smallest arrays, so that was not really useful in this context.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.9 (2009b)

[Rob Campbell]

Although I personally don't have any use for this, it is rather nice!

[Jan Simon]

See also vect2colon:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/22076

[Sven Bossuyt]

Somehow I didn't come across vect2colon when I looked for a way to do this. Out of curiosity I compared both implementations, and they're not quite interchangeable.
For instance
>> vect2colon([1 3 5 5 9 8 7 6 5])
ans =
[ 1:2:5 9:6]
>> eval(ans)
ans =
     1 3 5
whereas
>> vec2str([1 3 5 5 9 8 7 6 5])
ans =
[1:2:5,5,9:-1:5]
>> eval(ans)
ans =
     1 3 5 5 9 8 7 6 5
Perhaps I am missing something, perhaps it is a bug in vect2colon, but the result of vec2str makes more sense to me. I don't actually use this with repeated values, but I don't see why they should be 'not allowed'.

Anyway... thanks for pointing out that there already was a similar submission.

[Jan Simon]

H1-line, help section, examples, author and history (helps to search for updates in the FEX later), some comments in the source, "See also:".
This function handles non-trivial cases also: ([1 4 8;2 5 6;3 10 4]) => 'reshape([ 1:5, 10:-2:4 ],[3 3])'
BTW: This is not *vector*to-string anymore.
The author cares for usability, fixes bugs and cares about comments. Thanks!

[Jan Simon]