How to successively fill a matrix using a for loop?

Hello,

I'm relatively new to Matlab, and would appreciate some assistance on this issue. I have a large cell of data called 'ABS' (acoustic backscatter sensor) that is 4x16, and each cell contains a 256x1800 double. In words, this is 4 instrument channels by 16 bursts of data. Each burst for each channel consists of 256 vertical bins and 1800 individual profiles. My goal is to create a new matrix called 'timeseries' that is 256 rows by 1800*16=28800 columns in length, in order to plot the entire timeseries of data at once (all vertical bins, and all profiles for all successive bursts).

I first planned to do it this way:

timeseries=horzcat(ABS{1,1},ABS{1,2},ABS{1,3},...,ABS{1,16};

It works, but will be cumbersome when I need to do this with more than 16 bursts (say, 1000 bursts). Is there a way to write a loop to fill in a matrix automatically? I started with the following, where numprofiles is 1800 in this example case, and numbursts is 16. But I couldn't figure out what to write where the ??s are.

timeseries=zeros(256,numprofiles*numbursts); %preallocate matrix

for i=1:numbursts
    timeseries(:,?????)=ABS{1,i};

end

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and let me know if anything isn't clear. Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

In one line:

 TS = horzcat(ABS{1,:});

[Kevin Simans]

Why I didn't think of that, I haven't the slightest. Thank you!

[Stephen23]

@Kevin Simans: using MATLAB is sometimes a bit like herding cats... but it also has its moments of brilliance :)

Answer 2

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

% -------Example-------
M=cell(4,16);
M=cellfun(@(x) rand(256,1800),M,'un',0)
%------------The code------------
A=M(1,:);
out=[A{:}];