access the elements in a matrix given the column indexes

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For example x = [1 2 3 4; 5 6 7 8; 9 10 11 12]
Given the row indexes vector y = [1 3 4]; I'd like to get the associated elements : x(1, y(1)) = 1, x(2, y(2)) = 7, x(3, y(3)) = 12. [1 7 12]
Don't use loop.
THanks

Answers (2)

dpb
dpb on 15 Aug 2013
Edited: dpb on 15 Aug 2013
iy=[1 3 4];
ix=[1:length(iy)];
y=x(sub2ind(size(x),ix',iy');
  2 Comments
Matt Kindig
Matt Kindig on 15 Aug 2013
I believe that first line is not valid Matlab syntax.
dpb
dpb on 15 Aug 2013
typo, yes...should be obvious. Corrected, thanks.

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Jan
Jan on 15 Aug 2013
how about
diag( x(:, y) )
  4 Comments
zhang
zhang on 15 Aug 2013
Yes, you're right. I'm just curious why does this work? can you give a little bit more explanation?
Jan
Jan on 15 Aug 2013
in x(:, y) the colon operator returns all rows of the matrix x. the second argument 'y' does 'column selection', i.e. it picks only the interesting columns from x:
x(:, [1 2 4])
ans =
1 2 4
5 6 8
9 10 12
the values you are looking for obviously appear as diagonal elements in the result and can be extracted with the diag() function.
the reason why the intersting values are on the diagonal is pretty simple, allthough I admit, that one might must give it a second thought :)
I hope that helped!

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