Adding zeros at the end of arrays in a loop

Hello,

I have 184 arrays with different lengths named as 'path1', 'path2', 'path3' ...'path184'. The longest of these is 1*35 long and is named as 'path34'.

I want to add zeros to the end of these arrays to make them equal to the longest one.

path1(numel(path34))=0;

This is the line for making the first one.

I want to write it as a loop, but do not know where to begin.

Thanks in advance.

[David Hill]

You should not use different names for your arrays but rather index into a cell or matrix. How were your arrays generated? You should zero pad when the arrays were formed and store into a single matrix. You would not need to zero pad if you use a cell array.

[Stephen23]

"I have 184 arrays with different lengths named as 'path1', 'path2', 'path3' ...'path184'."

Numbering variables like that is a sign that you are doing something wrong.

Trying to access numbered variables will force you into writing slow, complex, inefficient, buggy code that is hard to debug:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/304528-tutorial-why-variables-should-not-be-named-dynamically-eval

The most importatnt question is: how did you get all of those variables into the workspace? That is the correct place to fix your code, then the answer to you question will be trivial to answer with some basic and very efficient indexing.

[hazal akova]

I have generated them by using shortestpath between specified nodes in Matlab workspace. For instance; path2 = [ 1732 425 417 1747 ].

[Stephen23]

"I have generated them by using shortestpath between specified nodes in Matlab workspace"

Did you write out all 184 variables by hand?

Answer 1

[Ameer Hamza]

Finally, you have encountered the problem of naming variables like var1, var2, var3, ... This thread has a detailed discussion on this topic and explains why they are a bad coding practice: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/304528-tutorial-why-variables-should-not-be-named-dynamically-eval.

The correct way to handle such cases is to use arrays. Although eval() is usually unrecommended, however, you can use this once to convert all of your variables to a cell array

paths = eval(['{' sprintf('path%d,', 1:184) '}'])

and then there are several ways to make all vectors of equal length

n = max(cellfun(@numel, paths))
paths_equal = cellfun(@(x) [x zeros(1,n-numel(x))], paths, 'uni', 0)