Increasing the length of a column in MATLAB

Question

I'm just beginning to teach myself MATLAB, and I'm making a 501x6 array. The columns will contain probabilities for flipping 101 sided die, and as such, the columns contain 101,201,301 entries, not 501. Is there a way to 'stretch the column' so that I add 0s above and below the useful data? So far I've only thought of making a column like a=[zeros(200,1);die;zeros(200,1)] so that only the data shows up in rows 201-301, and similarly, b=[zeros(150,1);die2;zeros(150,1)], if I wanted 200 or 150 zeros to precede and follow the data, respectively in order for it to fit in the array.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

You can do several thing:

Start with an all-zero matrix, and only modify the elements you need to be non-zero:

A = zeros(501,6);
A(someValue:someOtherValue, 5) = value;
% OR: assign the range to a vector:
A(someValue:someOtherValue, 5) = 1:20; % if someValue:someOtherValue is the same length as 1:20