How to draw a surface without some of the points?

Hello everyone.

I have a data, say,

x=1:1:5

And a have an y data

y=1:1:5

which exists for a limited values of x only. For example, grid of x will be

      1 2 3 4 5
      1 2 3 4 5
  x = 1 2 3 4 5
      1 2 3 4 5
      1 2 3 4 5

But grid of y then will be

      1 1 1 1 1
        2 2 2 2
  y =     3 3 3
            4 4
              5

So z(x,y) will not exist for some points in 3D dimension. Surf, as far as I know, can not handle this. It plots all length(x)*length(y) points. How can I draw this surface? Thank you.

Answer 1

[Jan]

This is not only a problem of surf(), but even Matlab cannot handle something like this:

      1 1 1 1 1
        2 2 2 2
  y =     3 3 3
            4 4
              5

A matrix must be rectangular. Try this:

y = [1 1 1 1 1; ...
     NaN 2 2 2 2; ...
     NaN NaN 3 3 3; ...
     NaN NaN NaN 4 4; ...
     NaN NaN NaN NaN 5];

[SomeUser]

Jan Simon, this is great! Thank you!