Why are my staitistic functions returning an array rather than a single value?

I've been trying to get my function to return a single value, but no matter how I arrange it the statisic function(x) always comes back as the same array that it was sent in as. What seems to be the problem with my code?

file = input('Please input a file name. ', 's');

while exist(file)==0

file = input('That file does not exist, please input another file name. ', 's');

end

filename = load(file);

[Rows, Columns] = size(filename);

if Rows == 2

x= filename(1:Rows,:);

elseif Columns == 2

x = filename(:,1:Columns);

else

disp('This file is not stored in data or rows, please input a different data file.')

end

xMin = min(x)

xMax = max(x)

xMean = mean(x)

Returns:

xMin =

Columns 1 through 19

2 8 4 6 1 3 5 7 9 10 11 2 4 6 3 5 6 8 9

Columns 20 through 26

10 11 5 6 7 2 3

xMax =

Columns 1 through 19

71 58 75 90 82 85 89 85 94 90 81 97 94 93 65 48 62 80 85

Columns 20 through 26

90 86 85 78 79 60 89

xMean =

Columns 1 through 11

36.5000 33.0000 39.5000 48.0000 41.5000 44.0000 47.0000 46.0000 51.5000 50.0000 46.0000

Columns 12 through 22

49.5000 49.0000 49.5000 34.0000 26.5000 34.0000 44.0000 47.0000 50.0000 48.5000 45.0000

Columns 23 through 26

42.0000 43.0000 31.0000 46.0000

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

The min, max, and mean functions operate on the first dimension that is greater than 1, so for a matrix, they will all produce a row vector for output.

The easiest way to get those for the entire matrix is to use the (:) subscript operator to create a column vector, and use that as the argument to the functions:

x = randn(5);
meanx = mean(x(:));

and so for the others. (There is an 'all' option as well, however I do not remember when it was introduced. The (:) works for all versions.)

[Ikenna Nebolisa]

Thank you, it worked!

[Star Strider]

As always, my pleasure!