Breaking a number up into its powers of ten

Tried searching for it, but I don't even know how to phrase the question honestly.

Say I have a number, 421655 for example. I want to create a vector [4 2 1 6 5 5] from it. If Matlab has a function for it, great, but if someone wants to suggest a general algorithmic approach for this problem, I'd be even happier.

Answer 1

[Roger Stafford]

"Breaking a number up into its powers of ten" is precisely what 'dec2base' and 'sprintf' undertake to do, except that the results are expressed in character strings rather than numerical digits.

However, it sounds as though you want to understand the techniques involved in this. To simplify matters suppose x is a non-negative integer and you wish to find the decimal digits that are used to express its value. Here is one technique that starts from the least digit and works up from there.

 d = [];
 b = true;
 while b
   r = mod(x,10);
   x = (x-r)/10;
   d = [r,d];
   b = (x~=0);
 end

Answer 2

[John D'Errico]

help dec2base

[Benjamin]

I don't get it. How does that do what I asked?